LANDSCAPE.
MEAT.
"PROXIMITY IN DECAY"
Five months in Chemnitz, European Capital of Culture 2025. Bodies appear and slip away. Painting breathes like flesh, color becomes space. Horse and camel carry on movement where man stops. Nothing is finished, everything remains in the making.
"BORDERLINE TO REALITY"
The mountains of the homeland appear in intense color. Behind the lightness there is isolation, behind the beauty a border.
"THE BODY AS A CANVAS"
The body becomes the canvas. Color, skin and space merge into images that only exist in the moment. Transience becomes material, performance becomes painting.
Current
exhibitions
Sani Kneitinger lives and works in Germany. From April to September 2025, she was Artist in Residence in Chemnitz, European Capital of Culture 2025. During this time, she created the group of works HOLD ME, BREAK ME with twelve large-format canvases and a score of sketches. The works condense the experience of isolation in the studio. A two-part acrylic ground forms the abutment, oil becomes a breathing substance. Figures emerge and withdraw, heads remain open, orbital lines maintain movement, traces of the painting process remain visible. Everyday objects quietly provide orientation, animals such as horses and camels take over the carrying, while humans become fragile. Painting appears here as a field in which states remain open without being closed.
Another group of works, the Candy Mountains, takes up the mountain world of her home town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Exaggerated colorfulness suggests lightness and at the same time refers to isolation and borders. The series has its own presence in Kneitinger's gallery in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and will be continued there on an ongoing basis.
Solo exhibitions, including one in the former Deutsche Bank in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, were sold out and show how these works find resonance between regional roots and overarching visual language.
Kneitinger first became known for her title as runner-up in the world body painting championship. In this context, she developed a performative practice that directly incorporated proximity, skin and transience and was recognized internationally.
Kneitinger bundles her body painting projects under the term Haut Couture. Skin becomes image surface, body and space merge in the performative act. In collaboration with cabaret artist Monika Gruber, she created a project that combined language, stage and painting. Other works such as nahLaut or Bilderflut expand this field. Here, bodies become projection surfaces in which abundance, emptiness and dissolution become apparent.
