ART CITIES:N.York-Friedrich Kunath

Inextricably entwining the experience of the ordinary with the sublime, Friedrich Kunath’s work explores interior sensation, recontextualization and abstraction, and oppositional relationships that propel emotional experience. Within his painting, installation, and sculpture, images and objects build upon themselves in a layered stream of consciousness driven by the autobiographical, the conceptual, and the emotional.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive

Friedrich Kunath’s solo exhibition “One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor”, follows “Frutti di Mare” (2017), a carpeted, scented, multi-room installation flecked with tie-died tube socks and outfitted with mirrored floors, a mechanical spinning canvas, and a vertical piano. Kunath carries on his study of a dichotomous human condition: an exploration in happiness and sadness, romanticism, nostalgia, longing, the fetish of authenticity, and the myth of genius. This exhibition negotiates the facets of personal experience registered on a psycho-emotional pendulum that swings between the search for deep existential meaning and purpose, and a frenetic, nonsensical and humorous nihilism. Here, two distinct groups of paintings, divided by a floor/ceiling, function as equal instruments in Kunath’s current exercise of distilling emotion from quotidian transactions. The works hanging on the upper level are executed with the precision of airbrush and a formalized, preconceived design, representing a measured and intentional approach to Kunath’s artistic output. These compositions were created in pairs, all set to seascapes of varying tonalities. A floor below, heavily impastoed oil paintings thread together excavated impulses and subconscious narratives drawn from months spent developing each work. In contrast to the airbrushed works from the floor above, Kunath relinquishes control and allows the painting to unfold through a process of automatism. His penchant for vacillating between somber and hopeful self-reflective emotive wanderings emerges at times as a crestfallen figure mourning his kite caught in a tree, or two silhouettes gazing towards a horizon, the phrases “I thought we had a deal” or “It gets easier” alternately hovering nearby in India ink. Hints of the artist’s surrounding domestic world are laced throughout, conversation fragments subtly carved into the surfaces. A final component, cartoonish personalities step out of the canvases actualized here as small bronze sculptures. Regulars in a cast of characters developed over many years—a stoic businessman wearing a tree trunk, a ghost ironing a ghost-shaped sheet, a slumbering vagabond tucked into his suitcase—these personas are emblems of Kunath’s world, one where the ordinary blurs with the sublime, and polarities reign supreme.

Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 19 East 66 Street, New York, Duration: 7/11-22/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com