Two years after Joseph Beuys’ death, some of the questions concerning the presentation of his work are commercial ones: how will the unsold works be marketed; how will curators, dealers, and collectors handle Beuys’ false datings? With the mounting of several exhibitions on both sides of the Berlin wall, it has become obvious that other questions are tied to deeper concerns about the power of Beuys’ artmaking activity to sustain its meaning now that the artist who so carefully guided its presentation is gone. For Beuys saw his “works”—his drawings, sculptures, and installations—as manifestations

There is nothing snug or secure about the spaces in which Paco Knöller’s figures linger, wait, grope about. These are menacing spaces without a location. The paths the artist lays out, on which movement still seems possible, can break off abruptly to become lurching pockets of air in which we are unstably trapped, as in his Sind süchtig nach Lügen (Addicted to lies, 1987), or can compress into the no-exit, fiery furnaces suggested by the intense red ground of Kurosawa 2, 1987.

Here, in an exhibition organized by the Nationalgalerie, Knöller showed 14 works in oil pigments and pastels on large-format