Silke Otto-Knapp’s paintings of cascading, roaming bodies feel as if they washed up on the shores of my mind like sedimentary particles— suspended and unsettled bits of matter that float and sink. Memories behave like mollusks, secreting trails of life, fading traces of the past. Clusters of silhouetted dancers appear to sprout from one another; their overlapping limbs form an intricate network tethered by some mysterious root.

Watercolor has figured into every aspect of the late artist’s practice and preparatory work. Repeatedly adding and removing paint on primed canvas, Otto-Knapp’s technical approach to painting might be described as a choreography of pigment, creating shadowy, cinereal worlds of grey. An installation of watercolor studies on paper are installed along a jagged horizon line that spans the length of the gallery wall, tacked loosely to the surface, causing them to flitter like leaves as I move across them, synchronously rippling like chimes as bodies move across the gallery.

Otto Knapp questions where the borders of life exist, imagining the strange and vast plains of life—abstract and figurative realms, psychological and physical. The silvery strangeness of Otto-Knapp’s greyscale worlds evokes the magical and longing feeling that sturs in me when I gaze upon the moon. Floating in the cosmos in one scene and swimming underwater in another, Otto-Knapp’s terrains are dark and light, thick and vaporous—figures move backward and forward, up and down, to the moon and back again. Her realms are vast, wide open plains where skies and horizons become fluid and unfixed.

Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blv
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through August 12, 2023