In our somewhat regular column, An Appreciation For… will discuss our love and admiration for an artist, a movement, a gallery, a city, a chair, a logo, another publication… literally anything we at The Unibrow are thinking of that week. Today we look at Friedrich Kunath and his new show, Aimless Love, on view at Pace Galler in New York.
It’s not easy making lyrical paintings. You know a bad one when you see it. And when you see a bad one you are really just thinking about the text that is over the oil paintings and distracting and really not as poetic as the person who made it intended. Anytime you see like a recreated past master with some TIkTok language painted over the top you know you are in for a show that you are not in for. Friedrich Kunath is not one of those artists.
Take his new show, Aimless Love, and one stunning work of a plane at sunset with the words trickling out from under the plane that reads “I Heard I Was In Town".” You laugh a bit, but you also understand the feeling, that sort of mindless dreamscape that begins to happen multiple hours into a flight where both you have solved and discovered all your problems in modern life all at once. You’ve been there, and the lyrical balance works with the work.
Or his beautiful dusk wave painting that reads “If It Comes Let It, If It Goes Let It.” You, as well, are just there and have had the impulse to say it out loud as you stare into the vast ocean and once again contemplate all the wrongs and rights of your existence. Kunath is right on this particular plane.
Years ago, when I co-curated Juxtapoz x Superflat with Takashi Murakami at the Vancouver Art Gallery, we had a few Kunath’s in the exhibition, mostly because there was a sense of levity and fun in the works, that perfect balance of high and low brow (a unibrow) art that very few can pull off with a sense of purpose.
There was this line in Pace’s press release for which struck me as the perfect anecdote of our times: aimless momentum. That is the mood of the world right now, lots of movement with sort of lost sense of why? And Kunath seems to be making paintings of that feeling, of this sort of overwhelming sense of needing to be everywhere and nowhere all at the same time and making peace with how you can never be satisfied with where you choose to be. Or at least fully satisfied. We are always looking for somewhere else to be although home might be where your best aimless love is.
So that is why I appreciate Kunath. The constant exploration of where our mind wanders when the most beautiful things in life are right in front of you. —Evan Pricco
