PRESENTATION: Friedrich Kunath -I’ll Try To Be More Romantic

In Friedrich Kunath’s artistic work, which in addition to painting also includes sculptures, installations, films and music, longing, loneliness, euphoria and fear are the recurring themes. He effortlessly plays through all genres of contemporary art and finds pictorial forms that are reminiscent of that “festival of wit, humor and philosophy” that Ludwig Tieck noted among the Jena Romantics.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunstsammlung Jena Archive

Born in 1974 in Chemnitz, East Germany Friedrich Kunath spent his teenage years in West Berlin and later traveled across America before attending the Peter Mertes Stipendium in Bonn. Since settling in Los Angeles, Kunath’s work has undergone a shift towards darker subject matter and more saturated colors. Friedrich Kunath presents his solo exhibition “I’ll Try To Be More Romantic” in Kunstsammlung Jena. Kunath utilizes a personal style of romantic conceptualism, layering poetic phrases with poignant, often melancholy imagery. The work embraces comedy and pathos, evoking universal feelings of love, hope, longing, and despair. The artist’s personal journey from Germany to Los Angeles plays a key role in his work, incorporating German Romanticism and western popular culture, with still life, cartoon imagery, commercial illustration, nature photography and lyrical references, German Romanticism is the most German of all German art ideas. It is the expression of, and opposition to, emergent modernism, and probably the last rearguard action against the relentless advance of progress, enlightenment and industrialization. It addressed the Dialectic of Enlightenment 150 years before Horkheimer and Adorno did. The deep connection between the art of painting and seemingly harmonious cultural landscapes at imminent risk of destruction from the ‘blessing’ of progress first came to light when their beauty seemed. And it is this pain of parting that has sustained German culture for over 200 years. It is the soul of the German soul and, in its perversity, brokenness and radicalness, it connects with any political persuasion. In his work, Friedrich Kunath cites German Romanticism as he sees it in his Californian rear-view mirror: having left his homeland for the far, far west, he views it from a place where only a surrogate Romanticism exists. Friedrich Kunath has no belief in Romanticism, yet artistically he remains under its aegis. From the writings of Schlegel, he learned about irony as a fundamental aesthetic principle of Romanticism. Romantic irony is the conceptual abyss to this subjectivist art form: its meta-level or double floor – or both. In Romantic art, irony has its own characters and tricks, such as the Buffo, or clown and light hearted deconstructor in opera, and the Parabase, a level of reflection specially introduced into a work identifying the artist, conditions, and principles of its creation and subject. Everything is process. Nothing is true. Everything is subjective. The path is a goal. And with Kunath, there is a moment when he releases a picture to mature on its own, to finish creating itself. To him, a painting is good when the artist chose the right moment to let go. Navigating a labyrinth of false emotions, heseeks an exit from the surrogate Romanticism, often leaving his pictures to reverse out of the maze for themselves. On this journey, Kunath sees every means as justifiable. He becomes overly saccharine, undermines, scuppers, executes, twists, and exaggerates, fights and fights back… — but still the primal sense of the longing remains, outlasting everything, indestructible. And that’s the miracle: Kunath places the crash test dummy alongside Schlegel’s Buffo. Time and again, he leaves his paintings to collide head on with the same wall of naïve art-is-beauty-is-perfection-pathos. Everything remains a fragment. Only when they have documented their crash and its impact are his pictures. With Kunath, a sequential transmission of emotional samples rattles through his pictures at breakneck speed. There is no straight route conveying what is real and/or real feelings any more. Our global visual culture has boiled almost every visual signal down to an emoji, and it’s into this tornado of representations that Kunath flees. He drifts — with paradoxes, sarcasm, and bar humour — from the sublime into the void.

Photo: Friedrich Kunath, We’ll See, 2020, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 66 x 96 inches, © Friedrich Kunath, Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe Gallery

Info: Kunstsammlung Jena,  Markt 7, Jena, Germany, Duration: 11/12/2021-16/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10;00-17:00, www.kunstsammlung-jena.de