What might painting have in common with dance? The obvious answers: figuration, composition, gesture. The less obvious: music, a musicality driving a viewer’s experience of time and space. In September 2008, Artforum celebrated the work of iconoclastic British choreographer Michael Clark, inviting contributions from collaborators and admirers such as curator Catherine Wood, dancer Kate Coyne, and painter Silke Otto-Knapp. A lover of dance and theater, Otto-Knapp wrote with such precision and grace about Clark that reading her feels somewhat like dancing. Note how the following sentence performs
OUR DEAR FRIEND Silke Otto-Knapp left us on the full moon of October 9. Silke was unprepared to go, and we were unprepared for her to leave. In the studio she had recently built in her garden were preparatory sketches, models, one finished work, one incomplete work, and several primed canvases she had been working on. The title “Versammlung,” roughly meaning a gathering or assembly, was fitting for the group of paintings that made it to Galerie Buchholz in New York for the opening of her show there on October 28. They depicted groups of figures (women) gathered in sets on folding screens. But