In his drawings, texts, objects, photographs, and videos, German artist Friedrich Kunath deals with such themes as longing, melancholy, loneliness, wanderlust, and wistfulness from a subjective viewpoint that finds expression in titles like Homesick, I am a stranger here or I may not always love you. He combines personal life experiences with literary, musical, or art historical references into visual, ironic commentaries in various media. The installative total context of his exhibitions forms narrative contexts between the individual pieces that lead to the viewer to a fantastic world of associations. Kunath regularly references ideas of the Romantic period. And so he betakes himself to the shore and glances off into the distant horizon in an approximation of Caspar David Friedrich complete with his own bed. By employing re-combinations, size differences, omissions, remodelings, overpaintings, and reflections, he creates pictures that are as melancholic as they are hopeful, as absurd as they are humorous. Friedrich Kunath makes use of the grotesque and exaggerations in his works without clinging to superficial humor. The images and scenes portrayed as sculptures, paintings, or detailed drawings and caricatures are not harmless jokes, but rather ambiguous metaphors for the present. He encounters the question regarding self-positioning in the framework of various cultural influences with knowing irony. His pieces undercut ingrained pictorial traditions and conventions and link seemingly incompatible approaches such as humor and melancholy, narration and abstraction or fiction and reality. This catalogue is published on the occasion of Kunath's solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Hannover, November 28, 2009-January 24, 2010. Contributors Douglas Fogle, Matthew Thompson, René Zechlin

The first major monograph devoted to the witty paintings and sculpture of Los Angeles–based artist Friedrich Kunath. 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 even 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.

Text by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Gregor Jansen, Anna Grande, Jeff Poe.

Artist's book produced in conjunction with an exhibition held at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Sept. 8-Oct. 27, 2012.

The book encompasses the last five years of German artist Friedrich Kunath's (born 1974) practice: complex and playful installations of paintings, sculptures and videos featuring a cornucopia of imagery drawn from such diverse sources as Old Master paintings, slapstick cartoons, anthropomorphized animals and pop iconography from the 1960s and 70s.