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Friedrich Kunath
I don‘t worry anymore, 2017
Archival Fine Art Print and three color screenprint on museum board
90 x 65 cm / 35,4 x 25,6 inches, unframed
Edition of 50 (5 EA, 5 PP), signed, numbered on sticker on reverse, with accompanying certificate
Single tall firs and a dense forest stand out dark and impenetrable against a sea of clouds that, in its blaze of colors, could not be richer in contrasts. Deep blue merges into a mist-shrouded yellow that suddenly shifts to a luminous red. Alphabetic letters flutter above the treetops and across the evening sky like a flock of birds that form the words: “I don’t worry anymore.”
Where exactly the border between earth and heaven runs remains open. Just like the cloud formations that can be construed as a mountain range, which draws the viewer’s eyes from the deep horizon line on up into the distance. Kunath helps himself to the conventional vocabulary of Romantic images and combines them with the bright-colored expressiveness of the 1970s. With this he resists any clear pictorial statement.
And typically Kunath, he brings an additional level of materiality into play. This is not simply a genre image and the painterly interpretation of a landscape, but rather an artistic construct in which painting becomes a prop. If on the surface, the depiction of the punched, lined and painted page out of a U.S. notebook is an everyday sight there, with his combination of a durably pigmented archival ink-jet and silkscreen print, Kunath manages not only to arrive at two different textures but also to call attention to the superimposed contents.
Friedrich Kunath was born 1974 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (GDR) and studied painting with Walter Dahn in Braunschweig. Kunath lives in Los Angeles. The artist’s awards include the 2012 Sprengel Preis für Bildende Kunst or the 2006 Förderpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen e.g. Kunath’s Works are being exhibited worldwide and are included in major private and public collections, e.g. Hammer Museum LA, Frans Hals Museum Haarlem, LA County Museum of Art, MoMA New York und Walker Art Center Minneapolis.
