Are dreams set in hallways because the perspective is screwed?
Or because they are the long, open, unused stages in our homes?
Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to present Twilight, an exhibition incorporating sculpture, painting, and photography by German artist Friedrich Kunath. This is Kunath's first main room exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery following his Gallery 2 show in 2005.
In the beginning of this year Kunath started to work on a group of sculptures that continue his exploration of how the impossible can be made manifest; inscribed on the edge of reality. The horizon of perception and the ability to suspend disbelief becomes tangible through recombination, adjustment of scale, omission, remodeling, painting over or mirroring.
The magic of Kunath's work is its physical and visceral magnification of sincere emotion. A double door with diamond eyes casts a literal and figurative shadow through the exhibition space.
There is a road within the home
some pine slats in the corner
and lamps along the walls that give the path an endlessness
at night.
If one is to continue the thread of David Berman's poem, a hallway is furnished with Kunath's complex versions of a barstool, a chimney, a shelf, a grand piano, a bathtub, a staircase, a coffin, and a wardrobe. Kunath's work continues to have a sublime sense of the personal and the obscure. The photographs and paintings on the wall anticipate the story of the sculptures; a jacket left hanging on an empty sheet of music paper, a smiling, deep-fried snowman sitting on a skull, a sailing boat passing a half-sunken portrait.
While each piece is a discrete work, the shadow is a joining agent. Loneliness, absurdity, and humor intertwine; the group of objects seem to be waiting - in a house about to be lived in, or one about to be moved out of. Kunath's title for the show, Twilight, also addresses this interim state when great potential, hope, and melancholy play together in a disorienting mix.
An outdoors that is somehow indoors.
Friedrich Kunath was born in Chemnitz in 1974 and in 2005 was awarded the Jürgen Ponto-Foundation Stipend, Frankfurt. Recent exhibitions include a group show at Tate Modern, London and solo shows at BQ, Cologne (2007) and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2006). This fall his work will be included in an exhibition at Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.
For more information and photographs contact Jeremy Lawson: j.lawson@rosengallery.com 212 627 6000