Newcastle University

Silke Otto-Knapp is a painter who works in the often-marginalised medium of watercolour. Unlike traditional watercolourists Otto-Knapp works on canvas, which allows her to repeatedly wash down her images, reworking them layer by layer, and therefore create pictures of great translucency and delicacy; effects enhanced by her recent use of silver and gold pigments.

Otto-Knapp typically works from photographic images and uses her materials ‘in such a way as to bring the transparent quality of the paint into conflict with the clarity of the photographic image.’ While her work always addresses the practice of painting through its concerns with the physicality of paint and surface, her subjects have ranged from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the cityscapes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas to the nostalgic glamour of Busby Berkeley musicals and the ballets of Nijinksy; subjects in which a tension between artifice and reality is both manifest and blurred.

Silke Otto-Knapp was born in Osnabrück in 1970 and she lives and works in London.