Friedrich Kunath
I Don't Worry Anymore
Book Launch Party
with a Special Performance By
Destroyer
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Saturday, January 26, 7-9pm
Open to the public
The first major monograph devoted to the sentimentally introspective and humorously existential work of Los Angeles-based artist Friedrich Kunath is now in bookstores and available online.
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. In the first major monograph devoted to the past fifteen years of his work, the reader sees how the artist poignantly yet playfully distills the fundamentals of human emotion -- desire, loneliness, and anxiety -- creating comically tragic scenes in which human beings try to find their way in the world. Shifting easily between genres and modes of making -- from painting to installation and video -- the work always maintains his signature wit and humor, laced with melancholy.
The artist has considered the ideas that run throughout his oeuvre and offers new insights by gathering works across media that are connected conceptually in eight chapters, organized thematically rather than chronologically. Art historian James Elkins takes an historical approach to Kunath's work, linking him to both recent and older traditions of European painting. Ariana Reines contributes a poem inspired by the artist's work and James Frey writes a short essay inspired by Kunath's persona. The artist and John McEnroe, the famed tennis player, have a spirited conversation about their shared passion for the game of tennis.
James Elkins is the E.C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
James Frey is a novelist.
John McEnroe is a world-renowned tennis player and commentator.
Ariana Reines is a poet, playwright, performing artist, and translator.
Destroyer was started by Dan Bejar as a solo home-recording project in the early to mid-nineties. Exploring and overturning genres such as glam, MIDI, yacht rock, and even the Spanish underground, Bejar was proclaimed "Rock's Exiled King" by The Fader. His is a body of work that consistently flouts convention in favor of musical leaps of faith, statements of purpose cloaked in subterfuge, and the joyous refrain of an optimist's heart cloaked in cynicism.