Henrik Jacob is a German artist who creates artificial worlds between the second and third dimension. The Knete series are in fact hand-sculpted images, made entirely from black, grey and white modeling clay that appear, at first glance, to be blurry photographs. 

The main project that has engaged the artist throughout his career is his investigation how familiar pictures from popular culture are constructed and what lies behind our desire to give them credence. This series, called KNETE, is a manifestation of what happens when one approaches image-making from an entirely novel viewpoint and methodology. The artist is playing with our senses: our eyes want to ‘flatten’ his pictures, to reduce them to reproductions of the photographic source from which they originate. But each piece of modeling clay that makes up the final picture has been painstakingly applied by the artist to build up a believable image. Our concept of image-making is forced to take a detour under Jacob’s playful ‘in and out’, ‘back to front’ and ‘upside down’ handling.

His images are not photographs and they are not paintings. We see them as images, but are they sculpture? The artist’s handling of the picture plane in the Knete series suggests a closet sculptor, caught in a painter’s body. As onlookers, we are invited to share in the open-ended theatre of everyday psychodrama, obsessively and compulsively embossed by the artist’s thumbprints.