From top: Friedrich Kunath, "The Inside Of The Outside Of A Dream", 2012, "The Years We Had Were Not All Bad (Free Agents)", 2011/12, "Almost Summer", 2012; Courtesy: all images BQ, Berlin, Photo: Roman Maerz, Berlin
'Come back romance, all is forgiven' neon-coloured letters welcome the visitors of BQ's stunningly well smelling gallery space. Friedrich Kunath's created a world, somewhere between kitsch and sarcasm. His current show 'Things we did when we were dead' approaches death, failure or melancholia with an enviable effortlessness. Kunath (*1974, Germany), who is also a represented artist at White Cube in London, avoids the surrealism-trap by showing more self-irony than anything else. His paintings are always on the fringes of a failed masterpiece-copy, but their layers continuously confuse, somehow and truly unexplainable develop into something beautiful, dragging the attention to incoherent details - bananas, clowns, American advertise illustrations, Brothers Grimm drawings, Pinocchio with tits. Romance, in Kunath's painterly world, is transformed into a compost of old memories and tightens up in his pathetic self-portrait The Inside Of The Outside Of A Dream. Kunath reanimated Romance. It returned, but this time it gives us the finger.
'Things we did when we were dead'
Friedrich Kunath
until the 30th of June
BQ
Jörn Bötnagel und Yvonne Quirmbach
Weydingerstraße 10
10178 Berlin-Mitte
Openig Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11-18h