ART CITIES:Chicago-Friedrich Kunath
Friedrich Kunath is known for his paintings and sculpture dealing with music, loss, fear, and other universal themes. His 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 Archive
Friedrich Kunath’s solo exhibition “Songs Build Little Rooms in Time” was born of an ongoing collaboration between the artist and the late David Berman*. From the time of his first solo show “Why Are My Friends Such Finks”, with Dirk Bell at the BQ Gallery in Cologne, Kunath has drawn inspiration from all aspects of his everyday life including what was spinning on the turntable. The title for that first show, for instance, borrowed a line from a song written by Will Oldham & David Berman*. In a sense, this was the beginning of the mind-meld that led to the collaboration between Berman and Kunath, “Songs Build Little Rooms in Time”. Around 2012, Berman and Kunath worked actively together on the book, “You Owe Me a Feeling”, with Berman providing notebooks to Kunath from which he derived text for the finished work. Several years later, as Berman was struggling to make sense in music again for the first time in a decade, he noted the use of his lyrics in a later collection of Kunath’s work. This discovery led to discussion between the two on the reasonable nature of such inclusion, developing from something that seemed almost antagonistic on Berman’s part into an eventual understanding: they would find things to show and tell between themselves and in the process, create a show in cooperation. Berman forwarded recordings that became the eventual “Purple Mountains” album, and between their shared interests and music, an obsession with tchotchkes, the writing of Thomas Bernhard and other favorite philosophic and rabbinical texts, they had plenty of common ground. In the course of their correspondence, Berman sent additional words and images from his travels on the road toward finishing the “Purple Mountains” album as well as pictures of the Soccer Club Club, the space which he loved to commandeer when in Chicago. This alliance was successful, with more than enough material to work with, Kunath was deep in his process, relocating these expressions outside of their natural habitat. The painter was in the final stages of this work when Berman unexpectedly passed. The nature of the show is somber, as anything derived from the source material of Berman’s final songs might be, but the playfulness, the romance of sudden discovery penetrating ennui that is central to both Kunath and Berman’s work is there as well. This work casts the contrasts of American life that fascinated Berman, with high and low values revolving in imperfect accord with the small details and dream-like juxtaposition of inner and outer landscapes that makes Kunath’s work its own.
* The musician, singer, poet and cartoonist David Berman, who has died suddenly aged 52, was the leader and sole constant member of Silver Jews, a band whose poetic, experimental recordings during the 1990s and 2000s embodied American indie rock.
Info: Soccer Club Club, 2923 N Cicero Ave, Chicago, Duration: 7/12/19-24/1/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, http://soccerclubclub.com
