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Peter Knapp
The Yellow Words (2026)
Digital print on canvas, 15 parts
This project emerged from a long-standing dialogue between the graphic designer and photographer Peter Knapp and the art historian Wouter van der Veen, who have been collaborating regularly for more than twenty years around the work and world of Vincent van Gogh. With this work, Peter Knapp sought to return to what may constitute the most vital core of Van Gogh’s legacy: his language. Not the voice reshaped by myth, but the one that speaks directly through his correspondence.
All the quotations presented here are drawn from the letters of Vincent van Gogh, above all from those addressed to his brother Theo. In selecting these textual fragments, Peter Knapp relied on a deep familiarity with this correspondence, developed through exchanges with the research of Wouter van der Veen. The selected sentences do not seek to illustrate a biography; rather, they reveal a human presence, a sensibility, and a unique way of experiencing the world through words as much as through painting.
Peter Knapp was also profoundly moved by Van Gogh’s language itself. As a Dutchman who frequently wrote in French, Vincent developed a mode of expression that appears at once unsettling, irregular, and almost fragile. Yet it is precisely this linguistic fragility that becomes a poetic force. His French, marked by foreignness and unconscious linguistic shifts, lends his letters an additional emotional depth. The sentences retain something immediate and vibrating, as though thought itself were arising directly before our eyes.
Each quotation is printed here in its own shade of yellow. Assembled together on the wall, they form a chromatic sequence that evokes at once light, painterly matter, and the emotional resonance associated with Van Gogh. The words become colour; the colour becomes voice. With this installation, Peter Knapp offers less an interpretation of Van Gogh than a quiet encounter with his inner presence.
Wouter van der Veen, art historian and Van Gogh specialist
Exhibition Opening Hours
3 June – 31 October 2026
FOR ART, Rittergasse 21, 4051 Basel
Free admission during the opening hours of the FOR ART Café-Bar (entrance)
Tue and Wed, 10 am – 7 pm
Thu to Sat, 10 am – 8 pm
Sun, 10 am – 6 pm
During Art Basel
14–21 June 2026, daily, 10 am – 10 pm
Summer break:19 July – 3 August 2026
more about FOR ART – A Temporary Art Intervention by Littmann Kulturprojekte. Basel 2025–2028
