FRIEDRICH KUNATH

Join New Yorker writer Naomi Fry and Pace’s chief curator Oliver Shultz at our New York gallery for a wide-ranging conversation about everything other than art.

The talk is prompted by Susan Sontag’s famous 1966 provocation that interpretation amounts to “the revenge of the intellect upon art.” Sontag once wrote: “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world.

Rejecting the need to locate meaning in art, this discussion, taking place amid Friedrich Kunath’s current exhibition Aimless Love, will explore music, film, and popular culture, and how these subjects connect to experiences and feelings of selfhood, itinerance, longing, and the sublime. The conversation marks the publication of Friedrich Kunath: The Grand Tour, a new monographic publication from Phaidon/Monacelli on the artist’s work, which includes an essay by Fry. Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love, which spotlights Kunath’s latest paintings, continues at Pace through December 20.

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Friedrich Kunath at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. On view from November 7 to December 20, this will be the artist’s first solo show in the city since 2019 and his debut presentation with the gallery, which began representing him in May 2025.

The exhibition will coincide with the release of a new monograph from Monacelli tracing Kunath’s work from the last 30 years. This publication, which features a new essay by Naomi Fry, staff writer at The New Yorker, will be available to purchase on-site at the gallery during the run of the show.

Known for his layered, lyrical work across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, the German-born, Los Angeles-based artist reimagines rich and diverse source material in cathartic images and objects. Many of Kunath’s paintings depict vibrant landscapes of worldly beauty, often incorporating poetic phrases and quotations from music, film, and literature. Drawing inspiration from Romanticism, popular culture, and his own personal history, he imbues his art with a myriad of seemingly disparate references and resonances, navigating the murky spaces between irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy. Thereby, Kunath sees himself as a composer of ideas and images across mediums, working fragments into artworks that become worlds unto themselves.

His first presentation at Pace in New York, Aimless Love, meditates on coming and going, free from intent, with aimless momentum. The works are inspired by the artist’s memories of listening to music while traveling by train or car as a child, looking out the window and watching the world pass by. With his new paintings, Kunath aims to immortalize the sense of total presence in those memories and experiences, while acknowledging the paradox of trying to hold onto an inherently fleeting, ephemeral feeling.

Installed in ascending and descending orientations that evoke an airplane’s trajectories during takeoff and landing, Kunath’s latest paintings lean more heavily into a meditative, contemplative space than his past bodies of work. These filmic, deeply personal compositions depict expansive seas and crashing waves, rugged cliffsides, scenic roads, and sweeping vistas, exploring moments of connection and loneliness, love and longing, absurdity and wonder. Seen through the windshield or mirrors of a car, the outside world takes on new resonances in the new works. In I Hope Future Me Is Happy (2024–25), a car rounds the bend of a mountain highway, about to disappear but still in sight. In another, a plane glides through a golden sky with the setting sun blazing through its windows. With Have Love, Will Travel (2025), Kunath situates the viewer on the passenger side of a car, a decision that reflects his view of his artistic role.

Kunath’s process for these paintings brings forth a dialogue between the unconscious and the representational image. At the start, he embeds abstractions and writings into wet impasto on his canvases. These underside paintings are made in isolation of the image that is created on top, but, in the end, there is a miraculous synchronicity between the two layers— his writings in the dried, textural impasto are legible in his finished paintings, bringing new meanings and juxtapositions to his compositions. With this “voice coming from behind the image,” Kunath says, he invites the viewer to make their own readings of the work.

In addition to paintings, Aimless Love will include a new sculpture titled Following the Feeling (2025), comprised of one pair of dress shoes, shoelaces, wire, and nylon string. This work is a more somber, existential take on Kunath’s 2009 installation LA Trainer (Permanent Reminder Of A Temporary Feeling)—a new iteration of an artwork that he produced early in his career.

Beyond his exhibition at Pace in New York, Kunath’s work can be found in the collections of the city’s Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.