10 Sep 2010

Jan Knap: The Metaphysics of the everyday at Zonca & Zonca

Coinciding with START, Zonca & Zonca is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition season with a solo show by Jan Knap. The exhibition will present, for the first time to the public, twenty medium and small sized paintings which have been especially commissioned for the show.

Knap's work is simple. It is so refined that it appears elementary. Immediate and apparently understandable. His work is mental rather then sentimental and arises from a philosophy that envisions a universe constituted by beauty, harmony and goodness and in which the Greek notion of καλóς και αγαθóς (kalòs kai agatòs) is perfectly represented.

The Platonic doctrines are reflected in the closed and classical fifteenth century forms that evoke the past as well as the present, through its revision from a contemporary perspective, suspending the paintings' intimate and daily scenes in time.

Jan Knap paints the universe of his dreams and his desires: an earthly paradise where children and married couples fill the canvas giving life to a balanced world. Through the re-creation and complex combination of elements, the most high and sacral subjects are humanized. The particular palette, symbolizing a timeless purity, is used for its light effusing qualities.
Knap's work offers the viewer a timeless and prefect everyday life and testifies its spirituality. The religious theme is framed in a world inhabited by angels that seem like human children, suspended between fairly-tale and reality.

Born in Chrudim, Ex-Czechoslovakia in 1949, Knap attended the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düssendorf where Gerhard Richter was Professor. After a brief abstract period, at the end of the 1970s his work become figurative and in 1979 he aligned himself with Peter Angermann and Milan Kunc the „Normal' group, which was centred on concepts of simplicity and immediacy. In the early '80s he studied Theology in Rome, after which he moved to Köln, then Modena and finally to Zelec, his home town.