FRIEDRICH KUNATH

Across the exhibited works, Kunath explores themes of distance and (re)location, where a longing emerges between the place you’re in and the place you’re destined to be. Roads disappear around corners, over hills, and beyond horizons; figures are silhouetted by the sunsets they gaze upon, luring the spectator inward, toward themselves. As we look out onto the world, the world looks back at us, revealing our weaknesses and uncertainties.

The German-born painter, based between Los Angeles and Europe, divides his time across continents, inhabiting the space between time and place. In his latest works, he reflects on the distance separating himself from the outside world, with each painting considering feelings of longing and melancholy.

Kunath has described his work by saying he wants his paintings to “feel like songs.” His paintings are emotional and raw, drawing equally from popular culture and art history. By bringing together aesthetic contexts and familiar tropes, he materializes his subconscious. Feelings arise before we know where they come from. This is the sensation one experiences standing before Kunath’s emergent imagery.

Spread across two floors, the exhibition opens with a collection of framed watercolor drawings where feelings become ideas, and ideas become expressions. Each work contains a sense of fleeting urgency, as if the images had bloomed from the paper itself. In works such as Untitled (2026), Kunath places a colorful Porsche half-submerged in a pond, the surrounding water quiet and still, a subtle depiction of tension between arrival and departure, further emphasized by the frame within which the drawing itself is contained.

On the floor above, Kunath’s oil paintings, illuminated by natural light from the terrace windows and the large soffited skylight overhead, come to life, seemingly born from the light of day. Upon entering the gallery, Kunath’s vision broadens as the urgency of the drawings coalesces into expansive landscapes. His characters all find a place to play within the epic scenery of The Most Beautiful World In The World. From beginning to end, Kunath’s emotional vignettes and landscapes seem to ask: Where is home, other than within yourself?