Kaikai Kiki Gallery

New Works by Kunath Evoke Twilight Eros

From Friday, April 15, Kaikai Kiki Gallery will present “The World is A Beautiful Place (We’re Not Hear For Long),” a solo exhibition by Friedrich Kunath. The show is Kunath’s second with the gallery and his first in Japan in six years. Kunath works in a variety of mediums, including photographs, video, and sculpture, and this particular exhibition evokes the theme of twilight eros with over ten new works.

Message From Friedrich Kunath

In these works I present landscapes that provide a window into an idealized world, that are then transposed with another world: the less ideal personal perspective, an inner turmoil. I’m interested in historical images that depict visions of harmony within nature because they force one to confront one’s own less harmonious reality. The long forgotten exterior, the romantic landscape, is reborn through the way I paint on top of this preexisting notion. I’m interested in the stark contrast between a private interior world and the exterior idealized world, and the works become the arena for these two sentiments to play out with each other.

These are the things that I was thinking about in the making of these works:

1. The long forgotten exterior
2. The distance from here to there
3. A landscape in 2016
4. My IQ is 300 when I’m asleep and dreaming
5. Let’s meet where the indoors and outdoors meet
6. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards
7. Let’s paint the inside of things
8. The torture of all these coexisting maybe’s
9. The sky looks alcoholic at sunset
10. Time stained landscapes
11. Arcadia
12. A man came in the liquor store at sundown, he was crying
13. All my problems are water based
14. These cheap sensations

Friedrich Kunath

A word from Takashi Murakami, the gallery owner:

Friedrich is an artist I greatly admire and I personally own a number of his works.
I couldn’t believe he would do a second show with us; I’m so touched by his graciousness. Thank you, Friedrich!!

I’m tremendously envious of his style… that is, the ironic romanticism of his work.

His works in the upcoming show also employ landscapes evocative of German Romanticism (Germany being Friedrich’s homeland) as their motif, and the artist adds to it the images of youthful eroticism. Imbued with irony, satire, and slangs, they depict the moment of landscape painting’s rebirth. To analogize using the cultural language of postwar Japan, it’s as though the surrealism of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s work is combined with indigenousness of Shigeru Miuzuki’s world then infused with a German flavor, and everything takes on the air of a jaunty abandon…

Please come experience such a worldview yourself!

Takashi Murakami