Friedrich Kunath
Coming Home Was As Beautiful As Going Away
KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Coming Home Was As Beautiful As Going Away, an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Friedrich Kunath.
Kunath’s work is a melancholic, humorous remix of elements of German Romanticism and contemporary pop culture. In his conceptual paintings and drawings, installations, objects, as well as works in photography and film, he combines classic subjects such as interiors and landscapes with East German television, Hollywood kitsch, advertising slogans, and pop music to create shrewd reflections.
Kunath appeals to universal feelings, only to then create distance with exaggerated alterations and irony. Where on the one hand the idyll appears as an expansive landscape, horizon, or palm beach, an ironic break reliably takes place through linguistic or symbolic expressions, which lends presence to both the transience and the futility of a search for fulfillment.
The exhibition Coming Home Was As Beautiful As Going Away ties in with various stations in the artist’s life between East Germany and the western extreme of California. It revolves around questions about distant wanderings and arrival, revealing moments of disorientation as well as reorientation. A central work is the installation All Your Fears Trapped Inside (2019–2023), a diorama of a private room that stands firm against the voyeuristic gaze as a time capsule, cabinet of curiosities, and compendium of things.