Running Out of Titles: on the work of Morten Knudsen

Part I: Biography

The first time I encountered the series of works included in Morten Knudsen’s exhibition STICKY EYES (paintings, collages, drawings, and monuments) was at Sweetwater in Berlin in 2025. E is for Everything, as the exhibition was titled in Berlin, consisted of four large canvases. You might see in them commas, musical notes, seeds of flowers as they take off in the wind, or bacteria detected through a microscope. More than anything, though, the canvases are carriers of material; oil paint, wax, and glue so richly textured as to evoke something more abject and undecidable: soil and grime, the field after plowing, the forest floor after rain, the slow rotting of compost. The colors are those of ash, bruises, and mud. Knudsen captures time here as the painter Frank Auerbach does in his portraits, through the accumulation of matter; but where Auerbach finds a subject for time to attach itself to, in Knudsen’s work, the world appears to give way to touch, and time disperses into a dark void.

The exhibition also contained three smaller works. Two of these were visible from the center of the room as you entered it. Both picture the outline of the letter E in fine pencil on a white, primed canvas, the font a slim sans serif. On the back side of a pillar was the third: the same E, this time penciled in, and obsessively so, the graphite dust smudging the white. Still, a perfect modernist E inside a perfect modernist square.

The exhibition text was short enough to quote in full:

A.
It feels like I am running out of titles,
or maybe I’m just beginning to give up on language.

B.
Of all things in this world, E’s are the motif I love the most.
Landscapes and flowers and O’s and S’s and H’s and N’s are all things I love too.1

Below, at the bottom of the A4, in customary fashion, was the artist’s bio. Except in place of “recent exhibitions include” was a far more intimate, more cutting biographical item: The artist had a son named Ernst who lived for six days and six nights. Here, then, is not an artist, but a human summed up by an instance of loss. In that moment, for that time, defined in such a way. The press release’s compulsory Curriculum Vitae—course of life—interpolated by death.

In an extraordinary text on how, what, and why one writes, the writer Annie Dillard proclaims: “The writer studies literature, not the world. She lives in the world; she cannot miss it. If she has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, she spares her readers a report of her experience.”2

Dillard’s text is an argument against the encroachment of life upon art; of the reality of the self upon the work. It is titled “Write Till You Drop,” perhaps in reference to certain religious practices in which dance or repetitive movement are used to achieve a form of ecstasy, an emptying out of the self. The body is exhausted and the self-reduced, though not as in autobiographical fictions, to a more coherent narrative, but to the ultimate unknown: to flesh. And it is this hard, impersonal bodiliness that makes it possible for the individual to transcend the time-space in which their self is locked, and for their creation to enter the realm of art.

I was fairly shocked by Knudsen’s byline that day, which seemed irrevocably and with a single sentence to transform the art. I did not want to feel so much, in that moment, about these paintings. And the grief is there on the canvases anyway, if you look hard enough. Did I need confirmation that it was real? It seemed like a lapse in the sober modernism referred to by the E’s, the abstract canvases; a besmirching of its white cube.

But time passes, and the art continues to work on you long after you’ve left the room. Death is not a commercial airplane flight. It is as impersonal as the weather, and though it might come suddenly, it is not, fundamentally, shocking. What I see now in those E’s is a form of stoicism; tremendous effort in the way of moving life along its path. In “Write Till You Drop,” Dillard also asks, somewhat mercilessly, that you: “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”3

It is a high bar. As high as modernism’s. A form of editing, which aims to weed out mediocre realism from truth. Without fluff, without vanity, without beating around the bush, to not enrage by triviality. In her book Illness as Metaphor, the writer and critic Susan Sontag divided the world into two kingdoms: that of the sick and that of the healthy. Dillard operates only with the one in which every audience consists solely of mortals, “as is, after all, the case.” Something has been emptied into Knudsen’s pencil E. It is not a lie when he says that E is for everything. For better and for worse, E is the truth he answers to.

Frank Auerbach comes to mind also here because he is an artist whose work has been associated with personal tragedy. He appears, though barely disguised, in W.G. Sebald’s celebrated novel The Emigrants (1992) as a painter whose life “down to the tiniest detail, was ordained... by the deportation of my parents” and whose trauma “fills all my work with the tragic horror of the Shoah.”4 In every brushstroke Sebald saw the ashes from the crematorium and the smoke from its chimneys—Auerbach was furious. As the art historian Danièle Cohn argues, his work is not stuck in a looping revisitation upon the past, but actively engaged in capturing “a continuous present.” She writes: “The temporality into which Auerbach relentlessly projected himself with each new beginning is the future.”5

The handout in Knudsen’s exhibition seems to reconcile these two positions. On the one hand, here is an artist whose biography is summed up by loss. On the other, E is for Everything, and the artist is “running out of titles,” “giving up on language.” That is to say, he realizes that language is an empty container and, as an artist, as a human being, you have no choice but to fill it with whatever is at hand. I am reminded of a definition I heard many years ago of the term “queer,” not as a matter of sex or gender, but as a cipher for loss: of certain options, certain futures. This kind of loss brings with it an awareness that signification is not stable, and that, whichever way you end up penciling in the E, it could always have been otherwise. It is not that you become entirely identified with a specific loss, but that an absence of self-evidence will continue to organize your perception of reality. Such a notion of queerness speaks to Dillard’s audience of the dying: the single kingdom of the people who will never stop seeing the world, to some extent, from outside.

As Cohn also stresses in the case of Auerbach, who erased his canvases in the evening to start again the next day, it is important to note that Knudsen’s works—whether of E’s, or flowers, or commas—are not repetitions or returns so much as vehicles. Repetition produces difference; meaning travels, develops, moves. At some point, what we see may have very little to do with where it originally came from. Flowers on a grave rot and disintegrate, turn into bacteria, just as E’s are, at a certain point, not filled in but, as in a later iteration of the series, cut out. Life offers you structure and material, and you lean into it; you use it to build a language.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes about this mode of transformation in “Requiem for a Friend”, his poem about the death of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker.

And at last you saw yourself as a fruit,
you stepped out of your clothes and brought your
naked body before the mirror, and you let
yourself inside,
down to your gaze, which remained strong, and
didn’t say: This is me, instead: This is.6

Paula transformed herself into paint in a way that did not render her work in any way “autobiographical” but rather allowed her to transcend herself altogether. Rilke’s radical interpretation is that even when she painted her own image, she did so “as a fruit”—as anything at all. This is the same movement that we witness in Knudsen’s work as E transforms from Ernst into Everything, not as an expression of boundless grief, but of an artistic language, expanding. Not “This is me, instead: This is.”

*

Part II: Painting

Knudsen’s painting distinguishes itself from much new painting of his generation by maintaining elements of the self-reflexivity that has characterized the medium since the 1980s. We know that Knudsen’s paintings know that they are paintings because of the stark difference between an E and a spiral and the thick layers of oil and wax, these dense, clotted abstractions. The juxtaposition of different modalities of image-making points to the nature of the image itself, to the structures that support it: both literally, in the form of the canvas and the stretcher-bar, and in the expanded sense of painting’s history and what remains of its authority.

An authority which has long been under pressure. In a letter to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Marcel Duchamp wrote that he “would like to see [photography] make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.”7 Modernism, in this view, would be a program of exhausting media, one after the other. In 1980, the art historian Douglas Crimp saw Daniel Buren’s stripe works as another harbinger of this longed-for endpoint: “[Buren] knows only too well that when his stripes are seen as paintings, painting will be understood as the ‘pure idiocy’ that it is. At the moment when Buren’s work becomes visible, the code of painting will have been abolished and Buren’s repetitions can stop: the end of painting will have been finally announced.”8 Here repetition is not a vehicle but a way of hollowing out; a count-down.

During the same time, the painter and art critic Thomas Lawson delivered an opaque defense of painting in Artforum, arguing that, since painting is “the last refuge of the mythology of individuality,” it is with painting as our tool that we might “deconstruct the illusions of the present.” He praised the work of the painter David Salle as “inert representations of the impossibility of passion in a culture that has institutionalized self-expression. [His paintings] take the most compelling sign for personal authenticity that our culture can provide [i.e. painting] and attempt to stop it, to reveal its falseness. The paintings look real, but they are fake.”9

As in Crimp, the ire of his language is striking. Is passion impossible? Is authenticity? The implication, of course, is that, as art’s ultimate commodity, painting is bourgeois and oppressive, and undermining it is a way of protesting capitalism’s influence upon art. This is one way of accounting for the post-conceptual paradigm of the last forty years. Another is as an experiment precisely in developing ever-new avenues for commodification, showing us how even the most ephemeral artefacts—relationality, attitude, identity, and even institutional critique itself—can be sold on the market. I think both are true. And still painting has yet to meet its end.

In conversation with Knudsen, we discussed how influential essays like Raphael Rubinstein’s “Provisional Painting” and David Joselit’s “Painting Beside Itself” might map onto his work, or not. Published in Art in America and October, respectively, both are from 2009 and both continue to operate on the premise that painting is primarily relevant to the extent that it is able to deconstruct itself. What Rubinstein terms provisional painting privileges the apparently unfinished, mistaken, and minor. It is an expression of “belatedness” founded on the “conviction that an earlier generation of artist has left only a few scraps to be cleaned up,” as well as the product of a historical moment when “nothing could seem more presumptuous or inappropriate—maybe even obscene—than to set out to create a masterpiece.”10 He includes under this umbrella a list of artists as irreconcilably diverse as Albert Oehlen, Michael Krebber, Mary Heilmann, and Raoul De Keyser. In his more cerebral and political approach, Joselit champions the quality of “transitivity” in the work of Jutta Koether as a way out of “the critical dead end” of reification that simultaneously manages to avoid the “modernist trap of negation” (in which we mind find Buren).11 By folding painting into the realm of performance and installation art, Koether has managed to counter the tendency of commodity capitalism to fix the meaning and impact of an object, and instead imbue her work with a sense of flux: ensuring that it could never merely be one thing, but would always be read as contingent, always defined by its place in an ever-shifting network of relations.

What Joselit calls “beside-ness” is close to what I describe as the self-conscious knowingness of Knudsen’s work. We are not meant to lose ourselves in the painting’s fictive universe, but are made aware of it as a specific mode of image-making. One difference might just be, however, that Knudsen’s E’s do not accompany his abstract canvases as critical injunctions but as parallel efforts in developing his language. As all language items, then, the transitive quality of neither E’s nor oil paintings can be stifled by their status as commodities, but belongs to them ontologically. Where, for Joselit, transitivity is about signaling awareness of the “art world’s networks of distribution,” in Knudsen’s work, it emerges rather as intimate affective links between the works, the space, and the viewer.

Perhaps, from our point in time, we can read Joselit’s idea of transitivity as less about warding off reification than admitting that painting’s famous autonomy—its removal from the integrated, ritual contexts of churches and other ceremonial interiors—is as fraught, possibly even empty, as our own much-touted freedom. Paintings need context and purpose, as we do too; their chances of life depend on the sensitivity with which we place them. At Sweetwater, the E that is penciled in was hidden behind the column as a way of staging its material gravity. Philosopher and writer Walther Benjamin regarded such staging with suspicion, as part of the “parasitical” logic of aura.12 But in E is for Everything I believe the assessment was correct that viewers needed a pause before being able to take it in. I saw in the smudges of pencil not a gesture of “personal authenticity” but the time and flesh of humans as such, at once particular and universal.

Rubinstein argues that provisional painting is “major painting masquerading as minor painting” because major painting, along with the notion of the masterpiece, has become “presumptuous and inappropriate.”13 He is not wrong. But I would rather tweak Rubinstein’s statement by another reference to Dillard and her appeal not to “enrage by triviality.” For even worse than setting out to make a masterpiece, at this point in time, surely, would be to make something that does not care to matter? A mattering that does not come back to topicality, but to the seriousness and integrity with which the work has been delivered into the world.

Krebber’s rushed brushstrokes, like the “hurried coupling of a prostitute,” that seem to say “painting is what I do but let’s not get sentimental about it,” are underpinned by a specific type of melancholy.14 It is the melancholy of the end of history, of the sense that reality has been so hollowed out that we are no longer entitled to such prestigious modes of expression as painting. But our present is, to my senses, so rich with extremity that the overarching sense of post-ness evident in Krebber and Rubinstein no longer quite resonates. Knudsen’s works are not treading water, and they are not making “last moves.” Rather, they set time into motion as a plain matter of necessity.

They exist within a paradigm where art matters because materials are scarce and the presence of mind required to make it even scarcer. Because we are all, in the most self-evident way, dying. The question of art’s significance is actually not—or suddenly not anymore—a very difficult one to answer.

It is also in this aspect that Raoul De Keyser really does not belong in the company of Oehlen’s two-string guitar and Krebber’s “rushed coupling.” Far from provisional, De Keyser’s is an art of absolute care and deliberation. If a smooth surface is broken by the presence of an all but invisible brushstroke underneath, it is not masquerade nonchalance, but a crucial building block within the architecture of the picture. Upon his death in 2012, the painter Rebecca Morris wrote in Artforum about visiting him during his last years at his house in Belgium. What she saw, she said, was “time itself”: “you cannot fake the process of your own arrival as an artist... you cannot will it into being.”15 Instead, De Keyser had worked every day to take small, incremental steps, making fundamental and yet nearly imperceptible advances within his painterly language. There is something there, which is both major and minor because it understands that the major event of arrival will happen only through humility and practice in the minor mode: seriousness applied to the task, humor with regards to one’s self.

Knudsen is arriving as an artist through the portal of great loss, and with the humility with which such a loss must inevitably be borne. His primary vehicle is repetition, as a way of emptying out, as I have said, by penciling in his E’s, but also because repetition is a mode that can move a motif, or even a practice, with every iteration away from itself, into a new place. The most interesting recent painting, to my mind, is characterized by this methodical disavowal of self. It is provisional in the sense that it is naturally contingent, always-already “transitive,” and the opposite of provisional in the sense that it always was, and always will be just that.

Originally published on occasion of Morten Knudsen's solo exhibition STICKY EYES (paintings, collages, drawings, and monuments) at O—Overgaden, Copenhagen, 2026.

1 Morten Knudsen, E is for Everything (11 January – 22 February 2025), exhibition webpage, Sweetwater, Berlin, https://www.sweetwater.ltd/exhibitions/e-is-for-everything, accessed 20 May 2026.

2 Annie Dillard, “Write Till You Drop,” The New York Times Book Review, 28 May 1989.

3 Ibid.

4 Quoted in Danièle Cohn, “His Work, His Life” in Frank Auerbach, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Michael Werner, Berlin, 2025.

5 Ibid.

6 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell, Random House, London, 1984.

7 Quoted in Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting” [1980] in On the Museum’s Ruins, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p.92.

8 Ibid., p.105.

9 Thomas Lawson, “Last Exit: Painting,” Artforum, October 1981.

10 Raphael Rubinstein, “Provisional Painting,” Art in America, May 2009.

11 David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself”, October, no.130, Fall 2009.

12 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York, 1969, pp.217–51.

13 Rubinstein, 2009.

14 Ibid.

15 Rebecca Morris, “Rebecca Morris on Raoul De Keyser,” Artforum, March 2013.