Biography of Friedrich Kunath
LA-based German artist Friedrich Kunath is a rising star of the international art world. His works are melancholic explorations of contemporary human emotional experience, harmoniously bringing together the ordinary and the extraordinary. Landscapes and human figures are often rendered dream-like and nostalgic through surreal and vibrantly-colored compositions, interwoven with texts and musical scores. References to romanticism, cartoon imagery and a sci-fi future all come to mind at once, creating complex and conceptually weighty meditations.
Print-making, drawing, photography, painting and sculpture are all important mediums in Friedrich Kunath’s practice. Paper is particularly significant, and serves not merely as a backdrop for artworks, but as an intrinsic element to be explored in its own right. Paper has been one of the most commonplace materials for generations, serving a vital role in transmitting knowledge. Note-book lines and hole-punched margins are carefully printed and drawn onto several of Kunath’s works. As we become increasingly absorbed in technological alternatives for learning materials, Kunath’s references to school book pages are all the more loaded—they seem to express melancholia even in anticipation of the future. Whether through painting, printing or drawing, Kunath then imbues the every-day objects and landscape settings in warm and surreal hues. In some of his works, the compositions themselves take on a Surrealist quality, breaking free of all sense of scale and perspective, with people, cartoons, animals and objects floating in firey planes of light and shadow.
Friedrich Kunath features in the collections of such public institutions as the Hammer Museum and LACMA in LA, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Frans Hals Museum in Holland. Still a young artist, he has had solo exhibitions at Aspen Art Museum and The Hammer Museum in the USA, Modern Art Oxford in the UK and the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin, Germany. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.