Imi Knoebel was born Klaus Wolf Knoebel in 1940 in Dessau, Germany. In the early 1960s, Knoebel attended the Arts and Crafts School in Darmstadt and formed a friendship with Rainer Giese. Together, they adopted the pseudonym IMI, which stood for “Ich Mit Ihm” (I with him). From 1964-1971, Knoebel attended the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he studied under Joseph Beuys, and also met and became close friends with Blinky Palermo.
Knoebel’s oeuvre includes a range of mediums—drawing, photography, light projections, sculpture and painting—focuses primarily on the interplay of color, material, and form.
Knoebel’s first solo exhibition with Imi Giese was at the Charlottenburg, Copenhagen in 1968, followed by a solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1972. Other solo exhibitions were presented at the Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; Städtisches Museum, Bonn; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht; Kunstverein St. Gallen / Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; IVAM Centre Julio Gonzales, Valencia; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Musée de Grenoble; Institut, Düsseldorf; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Kunsthalle Weishaupt, Ulm; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag; Schauwerk, Sindelfingen; Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig; Parkhaus, Düsseldorf; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Haus Esters, Krefeld; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21, Düsseldorf; Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot, France, among many others.