(b. 1957, Brussels, Belgium)
Solange Knopf uses the most basic, direct, and intimate of media drawing—to create work that is at once intricately detailed and immersive. Her artistic practice did not emerge until she was in her forties. As is often the case with self-taught artists, trauma led to artistic creation, with the compelling need to, in her words, “express myself, to break out of everything that had been confining me and to finally, fully live my own story.” Art, she has said, “became the means by which to recapture my own identity.”
Working in solitary silence and often at night, Knopf creates her deeply personal work without advance planning. For her, art making is a process of discovery, and she has described it as “a meditation where images appear to me one after the other.” She begins with an intuitive assortment of lines, forms, and colors and then, she says, “I stand back, and I look and the first images come to me, [and] I register them on the paper … and all this I begin again as long as it flows … until the moment I can’t see anything more to add.” Her drawings are layered, heavily worked and reworked.
For Knopf art making is not about the result; in fact, she never draws with a finished work in mind. “I never make plans,” she says. “I work with the unknown.”