Between Cat Content and Middle-Class Realism: Collecting, Sampling, and Mixing Symbols.

Painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation comprise the work of Christoph Knecht (born 1983 in Karlsruhe; lives and works in Dusseldorf). The motifs of his works are multifaceted and disparate; the age of meta-narratives seems bygone. As a representative of the younger generation of digital natives, the artist is guided by this notion. Knecht’s wide-ranging selection of motifs reflects the will to cognize: he unravels signs, explores ideas of cultural belonging, and pushes toward engagement by reiterating and modifying symbolisms. The series Plant of Opportunities shows amorphous plant people that even the Surrealists could not have drawn any better. Knecht adds an anthropomorphic plant boy carrying a smartphone to this supposedly dreamy and introspective scenario. Blue-painted, glazed tile works in the style of the Portuguese Azulejos form a 360-degree tiled wall panorama-they depict globally spread symbols, such as metal hard shell suitcases, ancient star constellations, or YouTube icons. In the series Yad Chen, the artist entwines Israeli beauty products with Islamic, religious quotes; he paints these on canvas in the Cubist style using Arabic characters. Yet Knecht also draws inspiration from what is less foreign and distant: he considers both his bronze kebab sculpture and etchings of copulating deer on cardboard lace doilies as part of his German narrative. The book shows a first, extensive cross-section of Knecht’s work over the last ten years. The texts were written by Jens Asthoff, Ory Dessau, and Nicole Fritz.