Raum 19 (Room 19), 1968, is a key work in Imi Knoebel's oeuvre, prescient of his mature aesthetic and practice. Created while he was still a Meister-student under Joseph Beuys, it took its title from the place of its execution, the number of his studio in the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.1 All seventy-seven parts— stretchers, planar elements, stereometric and rectangular volumes—are fabricated from wood and fiberboard, which has been used "raw," in an untreated state; the pristine condition of these simple geometric components gives the impression that they await future deployment. A commonplace building material then rarely used for the making of artworks, Masonite soon became one of Knoebel's preferred materials on account of its quotidian serviceability and ready availability. This humble ordinariness, together with the straightforward carpentry techniques it presupposes, signals his belief that the artist's practice is as banal and pragmatic as that of a farm laborer, an urban worker, or an architect. Notwithstanding his abiding reverence for Kasimir Malevich and Beuys, he claims that an artist's role today has little to do with that of a visionary creator inspired by mystical beliefs.

Also prophetic of much of Knoebel's later work is the way these ineluctably nonobjective forms elide the realm of painting with those of sculpture and architecture. But not only does Raum 19 dispense with illusion in favor of corporeal presence, it also restricts metaphoric and referential content. From the stretchers and stretcher parts to the picture frames, from the variously scaled planar surfaces, in the guise of both individual "canvases" and sections of mural-sized compositions, to the bland, simple sculptural volumes, it arrays the constituents and components of a painterly practice reduced to its rudimentary essentials: form, material, surface, space, support. Given its embrace of both the plastic and the tectonic, Raum 19 may also serve as an ideal model for a creative revisioning of the world, but Knoebel's works never create a metastructure of reality: "[They] take part in this world as things," Christoph Schenker argues. Moreover, in seeking to function as "instruments of the pure experience of 'image,' excluded from the realm of language," they remain, he contends, "at the very limits of communicability."

The polymorphous elements of Raum 19 can be variously assembled depending on the context, that is, depending on the gallery space and the artist's impulses. Since no fixed set of relationships binds the components, the work can expand to an environmental scale or may be densely compacted so that it appears as if in storage, as was the case when Knoebel exhibited it at Dia's exhibition facility in New York City, in 1987, alongside a range of other works. Given that the ensemble is permutable, and that its particular configuration, dimensions, and internal relations are dependent on the artist's decisions in situ, form becomes an event—sometimes chaotic, sometimes ordered; sometimes impenetrable, sometimes lucid; sometimes austere, sometimes abundant; sometimes confined, sometimes boundless. Though unique, every event remains contingent. Since any single installation is only ever one among innumerable possible compositions in this open system, emphasis shifts to notions of presentation per se, to staging as an abstract condition. (Lynne Cooke)