Exhibition “One Day I’ll Follow The Byrds (Tutto Pasta)”

So we are standing in this very large, labyrinthine warehouse in Moabit, which is filled from top to bottom with boxes full of the most valuable works of art from the Max Hetzler Gallery. In one of the adjoining rooms, some paintings have been unpacked; they were sent from Los Angeles, and the artist Friedrich Kunath has just put the finishing touches to the last touch; and so we are surrounded on all sides by these oil paintings, whose numerous figures look at us somewhat mockingly as we talk about art, and at the end we talk about East Germany. What probably had the greatest influence on the artist Kunath there in his youth and up to today? He thinks about it and says: “I think the Easterners have other quirks, but what they are not is a bourgeois.” You can say what you like, but she didn’t have any garden gnomes.”

This weekend his exhibition opens in the gallery on Goethestrasse, Charlottenburg, west Berlin. But the artist Kunath comes from much further west, from the sunny epicenter of the Wild West, from the cowboys and gold prospectors, the sunsets and palm trees, from glittering Hollywood. The painter moved to Los Angeles more than fifteen years ago. He was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz again since 1990).

How did it all come about? In the late 1970s, the artist explains, his family moved with him from Karl-Marx-Stadt to Prenzlauer Berg. East Berlin, subculture, Friedenskirche, Wolf Biermann had just been expatriated. However, in 1986 this life led straight to West Berlin, because the mother was soon advised to apply for an emigration permit, they were expropriated and flushed out, and at some point they were sitting on the S-Bahn from Friedrichstrasse to Bahnhof Zoo, each of them with a single suitcase, and little Kunath also had a tennis racket (both objects appear very frequently in his paintings). At the age of twelve: culture shock, endless Snickers, you soon felt sick and, above all, your parents suddenly had to work all the time! Instead of hippie East avant-garde: capitalism.

He then studied art in Braunschweig, went to the USA for the first time, returned to Berlin, then Cologne and finally: Los Angeles. Today there is probably no one who can relate the romantic German landscapes of longing of the 19th century to the American pop culture of the following centuries in such a coherent way. This Friedrich Kunath has been painting what are perhaps the most exciting, humorous sunsets of the present for several years now. He always paints them from different motives, and that is also why they are so good. After all, we live in the present and not in the 19th century, don’t we?

Kunath’s paintings, however, lead deep into the abysses of the past and memory. He often uses the work of the grumpy apocalypticist Caspar David Friedrich as a starting point; this time he has set his sights on Carl Spitzweg, who appears three times as a painted reference in this super-reference-rich art, which there is not enough space here to explain. Just one example is the six-metre-long quadriptych made up of four large paintings with the title “When Was The First Time, You Realised The Next Time, Would Be The Last Time”, which is as grandiosely perplexed as it is warm-hearted. On one side of which sits Spitzweg’s famous “Poor Poet”, wrapped in a Hermès blanket, he gives the finger. Perhaps this version of the work of art, which has become so popular in Germany after the “Mona Lisa”, is simply fed up with the cliché of the poor artist. “Spitzweg and Friedrich are so interesting to me as reference figures because they represent the extreme ends of a spectrum. Spitzweg has the cartoonish and sentimental quality that the radical Friedrich lacks.”

Friedrich Kunath: “When you first realized that the next time would be the last time.” (Multipanel), 2023–2024 def image

The artist Kunath is a king of sentimentality. Of melancholy, of sweet homesickness, of ironic distance. The little sayings and sentences that are scratched into his pictures in black scrawling script and sometimes flutter up like birds – their meaning hits you deep, where the feelings are located and the space between homesickness and wanderlust.

Kunath is a passionate fan of the band Oasis, and has even written lyrics for Liam Gallagher. He is an enthusiastic tennis fan, tennis player, and tennis coach. He is now traveling to Asia with the very successful American player Reilly Opelka on the ATP tour. He really is his coach, and they talk about art and music and films, says Kunath, that puts the player in a good mood. Mood and sentiment, Kunath can translate the years of learning feelings into pictures. 60,000 people follow him on Instagram because he translates all of these things into a total work of art. Is it art? Is it life? It is always everything at once. And often it is also: very, very funny.

Happiness? Somewhere between tragedy and comedy

Why should I tell you what is in these pictures? You have to look at them yourself. The dream images will tell your eyes and your soul a different story than mine and my soul. You can talk to the artist Kunath about all the really important things in life for a thousand years. For example Bach, the descriptions of the early Peter Handke’s trips to the USA, Roland Barthes’ theory of signs, the American-influenced world of comic characters in Germany in the 1980s, Prefab Sprout. He knows all the forgotten folk singers in the universe. And all their songs. Most recently he reported on the quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and his idea of ​​”spooky action at a distance”, which states that particles can influence the properties of other particles, even if they are far too far away for that. Does that sound complicated? It’s not at all. The paintings by the artist Kunath are full of signs, whether you see them or not; there is a net stretched around them, a false bottom, but they also seem as direct as a good pop song.

Yes, the sunsets, the feeling, the vibe – it is probably exactly halfway between a small town in the former GDR and Kunath’s adopted home in the American West, from where he ignites his play of nostalgic trace elements. And the immortality of eternal youth.

Friedrich Kunath: “Only Lovers Left”, 2023–24Dawn Blackman

Friedrich Kunath’s paintings are quite friendly, you notice that when you spend some time among them. There are some wild wounds of paint on them, but they also elegantly remind you of their artificial nature. “Hello,” they say, “I am a creature from the cabinet of curiosities of activated things.” They become companions, they say: you are not alone. In Kunath’s large imagery, two characters from a Russian cartoon from the 1940s wander around, their names are “Pessimus” and “Optimus,” and they are building a tent together. And that is exactly the tent you want to be in.

Happiness must lie somewhere between tragedy and comedy, occasionally you get a whiff of it on the air mattress of life. Of course never completely, that would be boring.

Friedrich Kunath: One day I will follow the Byrds (Tutto Pasta). Galerie Max Hetzler, Goethestraße 2/3, 7 September to 26 October