How My Life Looks like in a Room: Friedrich Kunath at the White Cube

How My Life Looks like in a Room: Friedrich Kunath at the White Cube
19 June 2011

If I could create a space to describe how surreally crazy my life has been this past year, (Title: The Travails of a Stubborn Dreamer Immigrant who thinks Europe still has something to offer while all of her friends are now going back to Asia), I'd probably emulate the exhibit of Friedrich Kunath at the White Cube. Just like Friedrich, I'll make the room a David Lynch meets Buster Keaton dreamscape: paint the walls black, have incense burning and yeah, I will also put a human-sized banana with a trumpet to welcome my visitors. Because just like my laughable absurd sense of optimism and pessimism about life in Europe, my room is a dreamland where tragedy and comedy meet.

As for Kunath's UK solo show, I was fortunate to catch it before it ended last June 4. The exhibit was a total brand experience in a surreal tragimelancomic utopia: The Most Beautiful World in the World according to Kunath.

(End of the room) In almost Summer by Friedrich Kunath
(End of the room) In almost Summer by Friedrich Kunath

I wanted to doze off in one of the sofas and smoke a Cuban cigar while looking at those vibrant watercoloured artworks that depict a male figure in the absurdities of over-loneliness, this word was scrawled in text in I heard I was in Town. I like the title of the other work: Let those Days I Don't Care Begins - because it would be really great if there could be some moments when we can just stop giving a damn about everything and about nothing. Kunath has a penchant for branding his artworks with powerful titles – for example, Younger Men Grow Older** was a powerful punch eerily accompanied by a visual black and white portrait of melancholic men pondering the inevitability of ageing.

Let those Days I don't Care Begins by Friedrich Kunath
Let those Days I don't Care Begins by Friedrich Kunath

Younger Men Grow Older by Friedrich Kunath
Younger Men Grow Older by Friedrich Kunath

A German-born American artist, Friedrich Kunath's exhibit explores themes of loneliness and dream possibilities in this exhibit. In a variety of mediums encompassing sculpture, painting and installation, the dark room is unbearably melancholic as it brings a twisted sense of nostalgia for childhood.

Playthings become absurd mementoes such as the banana sculpture with its footprints on the carpet; the man with a chair on its head and bird on its nose holding balloons and a reclining male figure watching a film while a toy train passes thru its body. The sounds of chirping birds mixed with the smell of incense are Kunath's nostalgia for that space moment of what has been. The central piece of the exhibit was in Almost Summer, an eye-catching piece because of its vibrant watercolours which are offset by the sad figure of a man holding luggage. It is what I can call a picture of the summer of discontent.

The Most Beautiful World in the World only exists in the mind. It is a space that acknowledges the purity of a distant past and honours (albeit with irony), the ambiguous outcome of the present where the most tragic of all tragedies is to be lonely. I am still not yet lonely in Europe (thank God!) but my past life in the Philippines had been brighter. I feel exactly like Kunath's One day We will Follow the Birds, where a voice utters, "I didn't expect to remain the same but I didn't know what to expect." But hey, I am still dreaming by the way. One of These Days will End. Bow.

One Day we will follow the birds by Friedrich Kunath
One Day we will follow the birds by Friedrich Kunath

One of These days will End by Friedrich Kunath
One of These days will End by Friedrich Kunath

Interview with Friedrich Kunath

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