On nature's comic indifference towards the human condition.
Drifters stranded on these landscapes connected by one singular horizon, balancing as though on a tightrope.
Balancing as ever between happy and sad, heaven and hell, silly and serious, history and the burden of it.
Idiocies of popular culture and the pathos of philosophy, the ambiguity of our existence.
The California sun is all I had for breakfast, and it sure did burn my mind…
Is the problem that we can’t see, or is it that the problem is beautiful to me?
These drifters are bit actors from a recurring cast. Homeless, although they are home. Homelessness is the mission, being found is the game...I waited for you, but I never told you where I was.
The search for meaning and happiness and for cats to pet in a dirty alley on a rainy day when you’ve had too much and the weight seems insurmountable.
The end of all wanting is all that I wanted. The horizon just laughed back.
From his precipitous rise in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Friedrich Kunath has been making art that beautifully and lyrically combines the experience of the ordinary with the sublime. His work has been exhibited widely and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including: Juckreiz, Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, Germany (2016); A Plan to Follow Summer Around the World, Centre d’art Contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France (2014); Raymond Moody's Blues, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK (2013); Your Life is Not for You, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2012); Lonely Are the Free, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany (2011); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Kunstsaele, Berlin (2010); 7 x 14, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2009); and Home Wasn't Built in a Day, Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2009). His work is also featured in prominent public and private collections such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among many more. In 2018, Rizzoli Electa released a 320-page monograph covering the last fifteen years of Kunath’s work.
Friedrich Kunath: I Don't Worry Anymore