With a background in architecture, Paul Knopf explores how form and materiality are connected to dreams, memory, and identity. Informed by building elements as well as domestic items and materials, his objects and sculptures are situated in the context of the home and its narrative as a self-made, Arcadian refuge in the digital age. He treats his works like digital objects whose surfaces are but an interchangeable image, i. e. a (photo-)texture applied afterward incongruent with the object’s shape and materiality. Yet, by visibly using temporary fasteners and DIY-joining techniques in a repairing and prosthetic manner, surfaces are treated like material skin instead of an image. The resulting instability of belonging is central to his work.
He is currently pursuing his MFA at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where he also holds an Osborne Graduate Fellowship. His work has been part of exhibitions in Berlin, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Kassel, Tokyo, Weimar, and Zella-Mehlis, and it has been published in Class Favourite Magazine, PORT, and blank magazine among others.
Before joining the Dodd, he was part of the International Media Architecture Master Studies—a joint program between the University at Buffalo, SUNY (USA) and the Bauhaus-University Weimar (GER). During his time in Buffalo, he was a member of BICA School—a free, collective art school at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. In parallel to his undergraduate studies in architecture and after a semester abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria), he joined the class for Sculpture, Object, Installation of Prof. Björn Dahlem at BUW. He received scholarships from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation) and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).
