FRIEDRICH KUNATH

Presenting a new body of paintings, the exhibition delves the viewerinto Kunath’s quintessentially beguiling and nostalgic world. The works,which draw from a wide array of references spanning music, pop-culture, German Romanticism, philosophy, literature and film, offerpoetic and existential contemplations on the composite fabrics of life.At once illuminating and covert, they shift playfully between mischiefand melancholy, comedy and curiosity, weaving together consciousand unconscious thought.

The title of the exhibition pertains to a large painting of two blueparrots, swooping through a dense jungle landscape. ‘The Art OfSurviving November’ is scrawled in small black script above them, asthey soar through mottled skies. Along the edges of the canvas, thickbulges of impasto paint remind the viewer of the pictorial nature of thework: this is but a painted illusion, not a window to a far-off land. Inanother composition titled I Dream Of It Often, 2023, the work appearsagain, this time as a painting within a painting. Placed upon an easel inthe artist’s studio, the image provides a burst of colour in an otherwisereticent room daubed in blue. The artist, silhouetted and brooding, sitsbefore the tropical promise of his work.

This is the nature of Kunath’s paintings: they flit between sadness andjoy, banality and euphoria, presenting canvases that read as openbooks of emotion, ever ready for interpretation – or misunderstanding.Subverting assumptions and instilling his sublime paintings with ahealthy dose of irony, Kunath creates images that cherish a democracyof meaning. In It’s A Start., 2020–2022, a winding road paves downtowards the vast ocean, marking the start of a journey that seems tolead to nowhere at all.

Words and wordplay have an important role in Kunath’s practice. Citingeveryday memos as much as philosophical ideas, they imbue thepaintings with both humour and profundity. As well as painting onto thecanvas, the artist also scratches words and phrases directly into thewet oil paint, creating palimpsests of half-baked thoughts. Describingthis process as a ‘raw dialogue with the canvas’, Kunath starts out bybuilding abstract compositions, before layering his works withreference images and fragments of text. Finally, a representationalimage is often applied – a Cartier van, a tennis ball, a jazz band ofcartoon fruit – cultural signifiers from a personal or collectiveconsciousness. Working in the tradition of music, Kunath sees himselfas a composer, pulling together, sampling and synthesising that whichalready exists into multilayered and referential compositions.‘Everything’s there,’ he explains, ‘I just recompose it.’

Kunath grew up in Karl-Marx-Stadt, a district of East Germany that nolonger exists. This sense of homesickness, of longing for a forgottenpast, permeates his entire oeuvre. Emigrating to Los Angeles in 2007,his dreamscapes are rich with psychological dichotomy, bridgingpersonal biography and universal resonance. His paintings, entanglingcynicism and sincerity, occupy a unique space between tragedy,comedy and romance, while remaining ever hopeful.