Friedrich Kunath
IF I COULD ONLY REMEMBER YOUR NAME
14.09. – 02.11.2014

In mid-September, the Kunsthalle will become a place of great emotions: longing, tragedy, wanderlust, optimism and humor. “Big cinema,” so to speak, in reference to Los Angeles, the adopted home of the artist Friedrich Kunath. Kunath, born in Chemnitz in 1974, has been living in the Hollywood city on the Pacific for several years after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Braunschweig and a stopover in Cologne. His works of art reflect the journey from east to west, the move between cultures. They are diverse, opulent and colorful, but above all they draw on the attributes and attitude to life of the superficial lightness of the “American way of life” and the cultural-historical tradition of the old world. In view of this broader cultural reference base, critics speak of “carnivalesque installations” or “kaleidoscopic diversity.”

“I can’t decide, everything is so beautifully colorful here” is perhaps one way of describing the oeuvre, quoting Nina Hagen. Because they are indeed “beautifully colorful.” The colors of most of the pictures are colorful and the works are also colorful in their structure due to the knowledgeable overlay or combination of set pieces from film, music, literature and art history. For example, Kunath playfully and casually collages abstract and figurative motifs on his paintings, or romantic motifs contrast with funny cartoon characters. And the cheerful, free connections between motifs, genres, texts and scales continue beyond the painting in his photo works, films, installations or sculptures. Figures and titles are united in an absurd opposite, or objects easily overcome their physical limits, forms and functions in the departure to new associative images. Some works may be pathetic, others tragic or comical. Remarkably, the connection between opposites, between fiction and reality, romance and absurdity, optimism and failure, works. “Anything goes” and Kunath, it may seem at first glance, cannot decide.

But the variety of forms of expression is deceptive. His works are not arbitrary or random. Rather, the collages, films and photos are well considered, the associations evoked, the contradiction or absurdity perhaps just the expression of a decision not made. And so there is a hint of melancholy over everything, resulting from the foreseeable tragedy of failure. A pessimism that Kunath counters with the optimism and lightness of his new home. And so Kunath’s work is fed by the union of two different cultural dreams. Bremerhaven, historically the port for emigration to the New World and at the same time the gateway for the “American way of life”, appears to be the ideal place for this art.

Curated by Dr. Kai Kähler.