Cosima zu Knyphausen Embraces Sapphic Carnality

I was recently at dinner with friends when the subject of eroticism was brought up. This, in part, was because one of our group’s former classmates had self-published an erotic novel that included the phrase ‘wiggling her bottom in the air’. Need I elaborate? And so, the question of successful depictions of female desire began to circulate around the table. We discussed how often the subject is represented with the intuition, curiosity and, well, carnality that makes it not only relatable, but also relevant to the sexuality women actively live and imagine.

With her latest exhibition of paintings, ‘Maestra’, at Galerie Thomas Schulte’s new space on Potsdamer Straße, Cosima zu Knyphausen combines material sensibility, figurative playfulness and historical allusion in a group of canvases that channel the joie de vivre of women wanting one another – not just today, but throughout the centuries. With a sapphic sensuality traced between works that are often so small in scale as to bring you nose-to-nose with the canvas, Knyphausen not only depicts intimacy, but entices the viewer’s own body into the fold.

Take, for example, Expiring for Love Is Beautiful but Stupid (2024), in which a small rectangle set within a larger abstract composition acts as a window to reveal three naked figures traced in the flushest of pinks and purples. One woman is having her ankle kissed, another lingers behind. Tiny iridescent heart stickers wink in the corners, all kitsch and coy. The women are framed by a mottled surround of khaki green and coral. While nodding to Henri Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904) and Edgar Degas’s late 19th century series ‘Bathers’, a surface veil or haziness makes the work seem unfixed; swimming in mood and colour, it is delectable. This almost-blurred style evokes the sense of melting into one another that comes from losing yourself in desire.

Another painting, Passage (2024), uses vermillion and pink vinyl paint with pastel on linen to depict two women kissing in their white nightgowns. Enclosed by a thin, dark red border, the work’s chequered purple frame also hints at the domestic interior – think plaid tablecloth or curtains. The scene is a whirlwind of energy, rushed and covert: a stolen moment of passion in the darkness. Pigment is applied with a sparse dryness that not only emphasizes the texture of the canvas, but also lends a roughness to this libidinal yet fleeting scene – blink and it might dissolve altogether.

Knyphausen’s references range from pop culture – The Line (2024) features the early-2000s girl band t.A.T.u walking off into the distance, arm-in-arm – to art history, with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (c.1620) being depicted in Noli me tangere (2022-23). Whilst her queer coding reaches into a wide spectrum of visual culture, it is the visceral quality of these paintings that makes them sing. A work such as (I tell no falsehoods here) (2024) even uses cracked eggshell to surround an ink-drawn image of two lascivious women in a four-poster bed, fabrics galore draped around them, as a stranger watches on. The eggshells conjure the vulnerability of such a moment: tenderness, desire at breaking point, even the violence of an unwanted gaze.

While some of the drawings teeter on the cartoonish – Untitled (2024) depicts a woman hastily removing her dress over her head while she straddles another, the curtains from an open window blowing wildly behind her – Knyphausen’s quality of line is so swift and precise as to be all essence, verve and yearning. Seen together, these paintings and works on paper are not just captivating, they’re goddamn sexy, and speak to a carnality that is refreshingly palpable and anything but coy.

Cosima zu Knyphausen’s ‘Maestra’ was on view at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin

_{Main image: Cosima zu Knyphausen, (I tell no falsehoods here), 2024, modelling paste, ink and egg shells on linen, 19 × 25 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Thomas Schulte}