The artist appears in a photograph. Dressed in black and wearing white sneakers, he balances on a ladder in Buster Keaton like fashion while hanging a painting stretcher high up on the wall. Two other blank stretchers already adorn the surface of the wall, and behind the ladder six large brownish Masonite plates lean against it. Another with rounded edges lies on the floor.

The space in the photograph is immaculately clean, apart from the left corner around the sink, which is crammed with diverse tools and debris. The artist depicted is Imi Knoebel, in the midst of working on the sculptural installation Raum 19 (Room 19, 1968) with which he graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy that same year. The space portrayed in the photograph is studio number 19 at the Academy, which Knoebel occupied with the artist Imi Giese, and which is next door to the infamous studio of their teacher and mentor Joseph Beuys.¹

Raum 19, a seminal work within the artist's oeuvre, has not remained within its original studio space. Over the past forty years, Knoebel has reinstalled and reconfigured the piece about ten times for public exhibitions in as many locations.² Although the successive versions of Raum 19 have expanded in size, acquiring an ever wider range of shapes and parts, the work essentially consists of differently sized Masonite panels, Masonite objects and wooden picture stretchers, all variously stacked against the wall, on the floor, attached to the wall or resting against each other. Depending on the site in which they are installed, these elements are put into different configurations, relating in diverse manners to each