ENLIGHTENED DARKNESS: NEW DRAWINGS BY SOLANGE KNOPF

ONLINE VIEWING ROOM | MAY 21 - JULY 3, 2026

Solange Knopf was born in Brussels in 1957.  She taught herself to make art as a form of spiritual exercise. Her drawings become wards to grapple with the trials of survival. For her, art has the power to hold off and/or attract various spiritual energies. She sees herself as observing the global cultures that fascinate her in their fantastical yet honest portrayals of humans and spirits.  By making these drawings she garnered expertise in the arcane practices of healing and spiritual contact with the earth’s myriad peoples. She absorbed the information learned without appropriating it.  Her own spirits were within her personal practice and fully occupied her.   She translates words and oral culture to visual manifestations.   Her life is a constant process of conjuring balance and presenting it to our eyes and minds.  

When she encountered darkness during the events of her life, artmaking gave her the materials of coping from within even while she was on the edges of psychological abysses and painful bad luck.  She materialized what she encountered by capturing it in her imagery, gradually replacing what was most difficult with diagrammatic sacred geometries and auras of healing. She used colors that danced on the borderlines of light itself.  But when the world became overwhelming, she withdrew from artmaking for several years and allowed the healing and searching to continue privately, at its own pace. The constrictions of her living space kept the work small and focused. This exhibition is the first time she has shown with us in several years.

After this hiatus and after finding a studio where she could again work on a larger scale, Knopf has been developing her work in two directions: a dark almost wintry series on black paper, and a swirling, spirit filled related series on white paper.  The two series are not contrapuntal to each other, they each have their own languages, and they seem to balance those deeper forces combining ethereal figures of dark and light.  It is a brave thing to share one’s demons and daemons with not only oneself but with the world at large.  The Surrealists sought this kind of vision in their own work, but it was not always native to them as it is to Knopf.   This exhibition marks her return to making her drawings visible to others.

Knopf is in constant search of the depths and limitation of her own muses in the ethereal universes parallel to the harsh bright world.  All primal peoples create art as apotropaic warding for self-protection.  Knopf creates her own.   These are bitter-sweet, never forfeiting their seductiveness to give a false sense of safety.  Awareness of the spiritual world is never safe.  It is a passionate dance with no absolutes. 

We are thrilled to be showing her work again.