ArtistNorwegian
Johan Knoff
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Johan Knoff was born in 1935 in Vinstra, Oppland, Norway. He received a formal academic training that spanned two countries: he studied at the State Art Academy in Oslo from 1961 to 1963 under Reidar Aulie, then continued at the Art Academy in Copenhagen from 1963 to 1966 under Richard Mortensen, one of Denmark's leading abstract painters at the time. This dual formation - between Norwegian figuration and Danish modernism - gave Knoff a technical foundation that he would carry into work markedly his own.
After trips to Germany and the United States in 1977-78, Knoff's practice shifted decisively toward large-format figurative painting. Encountering photography and super-realism in the international art world pushed him to develop an urban subject matter he would pursue across decades. The result was a body of work rooted in the social fabric of city life: bars, arcades, street corners, and the anonymous figures who pass through them. Paintings like "I Mean Street" (1979, Nasjonalmuseet) use a restricted palette of yellows, greens, black, and white that recalls newspaper photography. The figures appear slightly dissolved, as if caught by a camera with too slow a shutter speed - caught in motion but not fully resolved.
The cities that drew him most were Rome, Paris, and San Francisco. Works from the 1980s document interiors that carry a deliberately unglamorous charge: a snack bar in the Latin Quarter, a bar in Rome, a game hall on Mission Street. These are not tourist views but observations of people in transit, in boredom, in the ordinariness of daily life abroad. Knoff returned to Paris repeatedly through residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts - in 1993, 1996, 1998, 2003-04, and 2007-08 - and held a residency at the Fritz Thaulow studio in 2010. He also showed widely, with solo exhibitions at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo and at venues in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Bergen, Trondheim, Lillehammer, and Hamar.
His work is held in the collection of Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, as well as by the Norwegian Cultural Council, and in several county and municipal collections. He participated in key group exhibitions including the Statens Høstutstilling, the UKS spring exhibition, Østlandsutstillingen, and the Norwegian POP exhibition at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter.
Knoff's work appears at auction through Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which accounts for all 14 recorded lots in the Auctionist database. Prices have ranged from around NOK 6,000 for smaller works to NOK 31,000 for "Bar i Roma" (1984), with several of his San Francisco and Paris street scenes also achieving four-figure sums. All auction activity in the database dates from 2000 to 2005, suggesting the primary market phase for his urban work coincided with that period.