
The Collectors' Edge
Welcome to The Collectors' Edge from Nordic Art Partners – our guide to the specific work we do in the modern and contemporary art world.
We are researchers, dealers and collectors and our episodes explore the art and markets of under appreciated artists from history that intrigue and inspire us and that form the core of our professional activities. Our episodes strive to offer anecdotal journeys in learning, thoughtful insights and the wisdom of our professional experience, designed to help with well-informed collecting strategies.
Whether you're intrigued by the intricacies of the art industry, seeking expert advice on putting some of your money into art, or simply looking for inspiration about interesting and beautiful things to acquire that have been rigorously vetted by us, this podcast is for you.
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The Collectors' Edge
Repackaging The Sublime: The Pop Romanticism of Friedrich Kunath
In the lastest episode of The Collectors’ Edge from Nordic Art Partners we discuss the life, work and career of Friedrich Kunath, a celebrated German artist now based in Los Angeles. From his early experiences in pre-unification, Communist East Germany to the pinnacle of today’s art world, we discuss what makes Kunath’s work distinctive and unique and just why it has an incredible breadth of appeal to a wide range of tastes and geographic markets.
A departure from the category of artists we often explore, Kunath is not a historic artist deserving of a reappraisal by the market, but a fully established mid-career artist following a stable but consistently improving trajectory. We learn about his formative influences under the tuition of Walter Dahn at Braunschweig University in the early 90s, his forays into the underground nightlife scene of turn of the millenium Berlin and, eventually, his full commitment to the life of an artist. Known for his ability to synthesise a wide range of visual and cutural influences, from the highest levels of classical landscape painting to the simplest and most common manifestations of pop culture, we discuss in detail the characteristics of Kunath’s paintings, the themes he explores and the unique blend of painterly skill and lyrical humour he applies to them. Distinguished by powerful feelings of wistful yearning, nostalgia and self-deprecating wit, we look into the ways Kunath’s cultural anthroplogy embraces both melancholia and euphoria and, in doing so, encompasses the full register of the human experience.
As an artist who has honed and refined his craft to incredible levels of technical excellence, we discuss the current market status it has brought him and the highly credible galleries around the world that support, sustain and manage so well this position he has achieved both within the industry and wider cultural landscape. But what comes next for Kunath? After twenty years of evolution and improvement—of steadily building his body of work, his reputation and the insitutional regard for his work, is there to be a next step? We speculate as to what his career might need now, and the implications it may have for his pricing, value and place within a wider market context. Prepare to be captivated by one of the most compelling and poetic visual universes in today’s contemporary art scene and informed as to why collecting his work could be among the shrewdest acquisition choices any art buyer could make.
Episode Artwork: Friedrich Kunath, We We Will Be Modern Until We Die, 2023, Oil on canvas, 90 x 120cm (Detail), Image courtesy Travesio Cuatro, Madrid, © Friedrich Kunath
Hi and welcome to the Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners. In today's episode, we will dive into the career of Friedrich Grunert, an innovative German artist living in Los Angeles. Joining me, as always, is our art expert, iklas Robeson. I'm your Je. ppe C, . Let's get started.
Nicholas Robinson:It is with Alex Rotter at 400 million Selling here at Christie's. $400 million is the bid and the piece is sold. We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself, and how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is the Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls, to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered, thoughtful and well informed in your choices and actions.
Jeppe Curth:Welcome to the art of collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value.
Nicholas Robinson:Hi Nick, Hi Jeppe, how are you doing? Very well, thank you. It's nice to be back after our summer. It is, isn't it? Yeah, ready to go.
Jeppe Curth:We're ready to go, and today is Friedrich Kunath.
Nicholas Robinson:Yes, yes, friedrich Kunath. Yes, it's been a while since we've listened to ourselves speak about art and I guess, since he's one of our favorites, we have a chance to get back into podcasting with something that's very dear to our hearts.
Jeppe Curth:Yes but it's a bit different from the other times, when we talk about artists, right.
Nicholas Robinson:Yes, it is. I mean, often we speak of artists who we feel are quite significantly undervalued, underappreciated by the market, but of course we feel that their contribution and their place in art history will merit a reappraisal of their sort of economic status, shall we say. But um, but Kunath's a bit different. He is what we could describe as a mid-career artist. He's 50 years old and he's been working now for consistently for 20 years, um, building and building his, his body of work, his reputation, his standing and uh, and this is, you know, this is something, I guess, that differs a little from our normal field of interest, but I guess, qualitatively, we're very inspired by his work. We've been interested in it for a long time. We've bought many, we've placed many and it's just, you know it's, it's something we're very passionate about.
Jeppe Curth:Yes, it is, but can we start from the beginning and find out where he's from and maybe also some biographical information?
Nicholas Robinson:Of course, kunath was born in 1974 in Chemnitz, which was in the former East Germany, the DDR, and he had a self-described um, happy and and, and you know, well-rounded childhood. His mother was a band manager, so he speaks, has spoken a lot about how music was a huge uh influence upon him and in his household generally. Um, but the thing about living in uh on the on the wrong side of the iron curtain, so to speak, is that you know, it's very difficult for one to become aware of all of the things that you are denied by virtue of living there. Um, the things that you are exposed to are invariably things that the overriding system will allow you to be to be exposed to. So. So a very key thing happened to Kunath when he was 12. He moved, his family moved to West Germany, and this would have been in 1986 or thereabouts, so a sort of classic decade, if you like, for an explosion of sort of cultural attitudes, consumerism, et cetera, in a affluent country which, of course, would have been ripe for receiving all of these things. And one of the things, of course, uh, this sort of uh very um impressionable age um is the, is that the kind of uh utopia of communism uh would have been proven to be a fallacy.
Nicholas Robinson:So when he is uh in his later teens, um, he goes to the Braunschweig University of Art, which is a specialist uh art college, a well-renowned one Um, and anecdotally uh, I understand that it was his mother who made the application for him. She had seen that he was um skilled at making drawings, that he was content, you know, constantly doing this Um, and that perhaps this would be a good uh vocational choice for him. So I understand that she made the application, perhaps even largely unbeknownst to him, and then he was accepted, so then subsequently went to study there, and whilst he was studying there he was mentored by a painter, a member of the faculty, by the name of Walter Dahn, who was himself a protege of Joseph Beuys, by the name of Walter Dahn, who was himself a protege of Joseph Beuys. And Dahn was a leading member of an expressionist expressive painting movement from the early 80s, and the 80s was a decade which witnessed a strong revival in painting, and expressive painting in particular, and he was part of a group that came to be dubbed the Neue Wildes, which literally is translated as the new wild ones, but is more commonly known as the new foes, and this movement was involved in making just what they termed bad paintings rapid, expressive, coarse, crude paintings, and the sole purpose of which was sort of designed to interrogate whether there was actually any point to making paintings at all.
Nicholas Robinson:The work has been described as cultural anthropology, which I take to mean its tendency to synthesize, analyze all the visual ideologies of art and also everyday culture within these paintings, and of course it's a term that we can well, as we get more into looking at Kunath's work, we can understand that perhaps it's a useful term through which to understand his work as well.
Nicholas Robinson:After he graduated, he traveled to the USA, a typical rites of passage road trip across this um, this sort of fabled uh nation. He um ended up in San Diego uh, where he and some friends begin an underground nightclub which proves extremely popular with the sort of bohemian subculture and all the arty kids. But it's a culture, of course, that is a very nocturnal, somewhat riotous one um, somewhat riotous uh one Um, and we can um fast forward to 2003 and uh Kunath's liver and pancreas um are at the point where they have other ideas and he has been sufficiently intoxicated um pickling himself, essentially Um, so he has to decide that he must stop living this way if he is to perhaps even survive, certainly to be healthy. So he determines to do this and he gets himself straightened out and he then begins his art career in earnest.
Jeppe Curth:And he then begins his art career in earnest. Okay, thanks for the background. As he begins his art career, can you tell us what central themes he explores in his work? What is it about them that makes them compelling to collectors almost from the beginning?
Nicholas Robinson:Well, I think that, well, the purpose of this podcast is to talk in the main about his paintings, but Kunath Irv does span not only painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, video, where he sort of explodes his aesthetic universe and kind of surrounds us with all of these visual influences.
Nicholas Robinson:And I think, um, if we, if we summarize his, his, the feel of his work, um, it's to say that they are um highbrow and lowbrow simultaneously. They are romantic but also conceptual Um, they are, of course, informed by his own personal history, but also, uh, music, uh, the history of painting, german romanticism and American pop culture. So they are, they are tradition, traditional and modern at the same time and they, they illustrate tragedy, comedy, romance, love loss, yearning, aspiration, melancholy, euphoria, and they shift between all of these, these sort of tones on the emotional register, um, and then they kind of occupy a space in between sort of irony and satire, um, where they can feel a little bit sort of tongue in cheek and a bit cloying, sometimes also sincerity. So they sometimes can feel very profound, very uplifting, and he's very adept at kind of inhabiting the space in between all of these sentiments okay, so this wide range of emotion is one of his things he's known for.
Jeppe Curth:How does he achieve this, and can you maybe tell us more about his paintings in general? What do they look like, what do they tell us, and maybe also, what technique does he use to make them?
Nicholas Robinson:Yes, I think that we can't understand Kunath's paintings without understanding the sort of fundamental building block of building blocks of his work, and that usually is a romantic landscape, and I mean romantic in the sort of purest classical sense. And if we're going to understand what Romanticism means, we have to rewind to the middle of the 18th century. And in 1757, a British philosopher by the name of Edmund Burke wrote a treatise and this was called A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. So, according to Burke, the beautiful is that which is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, maybe like a Greek sculpture or something like this. But the sublime is that which has the power to overwhelm us, to compel us and even destroy us. Compel us and even destroy us, um, really, it's sort of summarizes the presence of almighty God and his hand in the awesomeness of nature.
Nicholas Robinson:And this period in cultural history sort of indicates the uh, or marks the transition from the neoclassical to the romantic era. And so you have all these artists that become inspired by this idea in Britain, artists like John Martin, William Blake, for instance, but possibly the greatest of all, arguably the greatest known of all, is a German painter, was a German painter by the name of Caspar David Friedrich, and Friedrich was a master at painting sublime landscapes, just incredible scenes of the majesty of nature. But what he also did is he frequently placed a small or somewhat insignificant figure of a man, often just a single man, who was simultaneously awed and contemplative when considering the nature in front of him, but also rendered small and insignificant by this might all around him. So these feelings that Friedrich is very adept at evoking in us are also echoed by Kunath, and Kunath has an incredible technical facility for making paintings that can replicate or ape this kind of very pure classical landscape. And then what he does subsequently is he overlays all of these elements that illustrate an altogether different set of influences, and these are things that we can summarize, as you know, things that he's derived from commercial culture, advertising, illustration, music, record labels, album covers, cartoons.
Nicholas Robinson:One motif that recurs frequently is actually something from a cartoon made in Czechoslovakia in the late 50s. There's a character called the Little Mole, actually actually, which, which won the award for the best directing achievement at the Venice film festival in 1957. Um, but this little character, um, he never spoke in the cartoons. His, his emotional life and his experiences were always communicated by um, these sort of non-figurative exclamations and through incidental music. So, um, this is how we understood what the little mole was was going through. And the little mole crops up in many of kunath's paintings. Um, I guess you could even, you could even sort of stretch the the um analogy to sort of say that, you know, he's also representative of, of of West. This is a character created in communist Czechoslovakia, but it's a character that is inspired by the way Disney used to imbue animal characters with sort of human personalities, with sort of human personalities. So it's also, of course, indicative of having this very, you know, elevated, high fine art landscape and then all of these more sort of lowbrow street smarts, you know a more kind of not a base culture but a much more mainstream everyday popular culture.
Nicholas Robinson:And then what he subsequently does is he writes phrases on his paintings, or paints phrases, and these phrases are designed to summarize, you know, the mood of the painting. Sometimes they are sort of very wistful and very vague, sometimes they're very sort of pithy and precise and they, you know, they're sort of aphorisms, that kind of encapsulate maybe the vibe of what Kunath is trying to communicate, or what he thinks the painting is about when he made the first of such works. This was actually just a phrase painting. It had no landscape behind it. No landscape, um, uh, behind it, um. In in 2003,. The paintings phrase and title was um, if you leave me, can I come to? So? This, of course, is is an example of this sort of wistful witticism uh at play, um. Other phrases, uh. Some examples are I restored my will to live again. I don't worry anymore. It's been evening all day long. I'd never thought I'd make it this far. So you have all of these kinds of phrases that summarize the mood that Kunath is trying to communicate, encompassing especially sort of melancholy and euphoria, often within the same painting. Sometimes the phrases are very ambiguous.
Nicholas Robinson:He's a big fan of tennis and he has utilized some of the language of tennis also in some of these phrases. One such one would be I need a break Now. In life, we all need a break, but in tennis, if you wish to win, we all need a break. But in tennis, if you wish to win, you have to break your opponent's serve in order to triumph. So this is an example of how his sort of play on words is functioning. And then another example would be. Love means zero. Obviously, in tennis, zero is, or sorry, love is synonymous with having no points. Love, of course, is a mighty thing, but Kunath equates it to zero in order to kind of create this ambiguity within this pun.
Nicholas Robinson:So these are essentially what his paintings look like and what they consist of, and then he will bury other little sort of gems or witticisms or vignettes within the painting. He will turn his paintbrush around and he will use the back end of the paintbrush as a stylus to inscribe sort of graffito-like little moments in the painting. Sometimes they're phrases that sort of refer to the main title, sometimes they're little cartoons, they're just lots of little sort of treats, easter eggs, if you like. That you can find. You stand back from the painting and you perceive this sort of overarching feel of the landscape. But then you approach the painting and you scrutinize it at a much closer distance and you get to discover all of these sort of visual treats that Kunath has sort of semi-buried within the surface, sometimes very heavy impasto encrusting on the surface. You know they're very painterly as well.
Jeppe Curth:So Kunath has gained more and more attention in the recent years. Why do you think his work resonates so strongly with collectors?
Nicholas Robinson:Well, I think that his paintings, qualitatively, are just outstanding. I mean, he's a really tremendously great painter and the paintings are beautiful to look at but they're also sort of entertaining to discover. So they work on these sort of many levels. They work on this very elevated aesthetic level through, you know, by virtue of his just immense skill at rendering a landscape. And then they have all of these sort of multi-layered, playful elements which, you know, speak very profoundly of all of the things we're familiar with as part of, you know, what art historians or philosophers like to call, you know, the human experience. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that his paintings are well, as well as being universal in that way, they're also quite universal in a sort of a geographic way. The paintings have this, you know, sort of unmistakable European feel because of the nature of the landscape, but they have all of these overlaid elements which speak very much to like an American sensibility.
Nicholas Robinson:I mean, he is an artist, he's a European artist who lives in Los Angeles, and his paintings are almost as much, you know, la, uh, american paintings as they are European paintings.
Nicholas Robinson:I mean, if you look at the history of um modern and contemporary art in America and also in, especially in the West coast, from the midpoint of the 20th century, we can see a very distinctive kind of pop art emerging. We have sort of assemblage, which he's also very adept at incorporating, even though I mean he has done, but he doesn't typically kind of adhere physical objects to the surface of his paintings. This is much more part of his kind of installation feel that explodes out of his vision. But what he does do is he uses words, in the same way that we've seen artists like, perhaps like Ed Ruscha, use words. So his paintings are, you know, they're perfect for a European sensibility, they're perfect for an American sensibility and because they encapsulate all of those things, they're also invariably perfect for an Asian sensibility which has, you know, historically and certainly in more recent years, been a voracious consumer of, you know, things that have a well like a almost like a cartoon feel coming out of the United States the United States.
Jeppe Curth:Can you tell us about his place in the market, which galleries shows his work or represent him, and do you think his career will have some next step or another level, and what do you think that will be?
Nicholas Robinson:Well, his galleries, I mean he's had a. He's been exhibiting consistently now for 20 years, so he's obviously been making his way through a number of galleries. During that time he's, you know, he's exhibited a strong, um, professional mobility where he's sort of graduated from one gallery to another gallery as his, as he's progressively got better and his reputation has grown Um, uh. Up until a few years ago he showed withenig in Germany, but latterly shows with Max Hetzler, which I suppose is one of the greatest galleries in Europe and has been for quite some time. Hetzler's, a legendary gallery, was the first gallery to show Jeff Koons in Europe 30 years ago. I mean, he's been doing his thing for a long time, so this is obviously a great gallery with an impeccable reputation and a big following and reach. He shows with Tim Van Leer in Antwerp, which is a very nice gallery. He shows with Arles Carl here in Copenhagen, which is one of the better galleries here. He shows with a gallery called Trevisio Quattro in. They're in Madrid and in Mexico and they're an excellent gallery too. And these are all mostly Basel galleries or galleries that exhibit in Art Basel. So obviously his work is continually exposed to the sort of highest caliber of art audience and consumer that there is.
Nicholas Robinson:And his next step? Well, I think that we're yet to really see exactly what that will be, to really see exactly what that will be. But if you look at the status quo of his current exhibiting career, it includes, you know, tremendously good galleries in Los Angeles, in Germany Hetzler is also in London and then of course, other important markets, but of course slightly more peripheral markets to where the main action takes place. So I think really the missing piece, if we can call it that, is a substantial exhibition in New York, um, and obviously there are some very major galleries there that have their the sort of the preeminent locations, um, for prestige, for, you know, the eyes of the art world being on them, uh, et cetera. So I I think that you know his, his career has been a very stable and has shown a really strong yet steady trajectory to this point. So he's obviously smart at understanding what he needs and plotting his next moves and he's he's also got the you know, the support of really substantial galleries behind him. So it can't be lost on any of these people that having that kind of show in New York is is important to his next steps, and I, and I expect that something that will will happen.
Nicholas Robinson:His work is now sort of crystallized to the point where he's absolutely in his sort of fully mature style. Um, you know, he's, he's, he's. His paintings have all the the the elements that I've described, but also an incredible sort of painterly richness which speaks of someone at the top of their game. Um, and and there are galleries in New York that know this um, he's not some sort of stealthy surprise lurking in the far corners of the art world, he's a, he's a. He's a famed artist of incredible talent and with a very distinctive aesthetic. Um, and I imagine that in the next year or two, there'll be a major show in New York at probably one of the best galleries in the world.
Jeppe Curth:Yeah, and maybe we could also talk a little bit about his prices. His current auction record is around $118,000 for 2.13m by 1.52m, which is not that strong. But how do you see the secondary market and also his primary market prices?
Nicholas Robinson:Well, he's a very interesting artist in that there does not, there's not a very strong secondary market at this point in time. He has, his works have been been, sort of, you know, devotedly acquired by collectors that, firstly, love the work. And so, you know, we understand it, we live with his paintings, we look at them every day. You know, we understand it, we live with his paintings, we look at them every day. We would not be keen to no longer be able to do that in order to get you know, whatever profit we could get. We, we, we, we value the works at this point more than than we would value that, um. But I think that paintings that have come up for auction and paintings that appear on the secondary market often are earlier works that are maybe you could say are sort of transitional works aesthetically, and not fully emblematic, qualitatively, of the mature style which, which we now see, which we now see, and the mature style now, of course, has synthesized all of these elements that I've described and and that is what has enabled him to basically make the step up to being an artist who consistently delivers this level of quality in every painting and who, um, certainly, certainly for quite some time now manages to sell out every exhibition, and not only that, but the galleries that have these exhibitions. They have the luxury often of choosing who they sell the paintings to, which, of course, is another element that sort of supports and substantiates the stability and well-managed nature of his career. So paintings that have cropped up before are not of that standard. Often they lack the very thick handling of paint in the impasto which gives them a real tactile richness, a much drier surface, much more graphic quality perhaps. And then other paintings that have cropped up.
Nicholas Robinson:You know, kunath does make some quite large paintings and if a very big painting comes up, invariably it has a somewhat limited audience, because a big painting is also quite an impractical thing to accommodate. You know, if you've got, you know, a three meter painting, a lot of people think well, I love the painting, but where am I going to put it? So it, you know it, naturally limits the potential resale market for the work. So that's a little bit why his secondary market is not super strong. His paintings are extremely labor intensive. He doesn't make that many of them and most of the works that he has made remain with the people that have bought them because they continue to love them and they want to keep them.
Nicholas Robinson:And the primary market of his paintings is sort of interesting because he shows every year and the prices go up every year. They don't go up by an app, you know a sort of a uh, um, you know meteoric amount. They go up by small, sensible, manageable increments to um, to sustain the level of demand, to, to, to create you know a very well-managed market for his paintings. As an example, a current sort of two meter 20 painting would be about $110,000. A one and a half meter painting would be $85,000. And it's not too long ago, maybe 18 months ago, that a one and a half meter painting that is now $85,000 would have been $75,000. And then a year before that, two years before that, $65,000. So they go up by these manageable increments 10, 15% each time moving his his career forwards. A one meter 20 size painting is $70,000. Now it remains to be seen exactly what they will cost in the shows that he is to have this year and next year.
Jeppe Curth:Okay, thank you, nick, for the walkthrough in the in the prizes. How do you, how do Kunitz prices compared to similar contemporary artists and what does he say about his place in the market? Sometimes we talk about the opportunity cost, right?
Nicholas Robinson:well, yes, of course, I mean anything, anything that that we spend money on is, you know, money that we then obviously can't spend on something else? Um, but I think Kunath's paintings are somewhat reasonable. Um, this is an artist who has been consistently showing in top-ranking galleries for 20 years. His first museum show was in 2009, 15 years ago, at the Kunstverein in Hanover. His work is in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, pompidou in Paris, the D'Este in Athens, hammer, la LACMA, la MoMA, pinot Collection in Paris, walker Art Center. I mean, his paintings are globally acknowledged as being worthy of these, these prestigious institutions. So obviously he's he's. He's a top, top artist and, as we've described, a mid-career artist who has achieved this status consistently. So I think that his work is actually somewhat reasonable.
Nicholas Robinson:There are many artists who have a lesser CV than Kunath, but maybe their work is a little more conforming to some I don't know, fashionable movement or other. I mean, we see artists that come from nowhere and their paintings are suddenly two, three, $400,000. Um, and I think that there's a great deal of market potential for these works. They're not, you know, they're. It's easy to see them also as extremely finely crafted objects. You know, this is a master of painting. Kunath is, is is a master of painting and so qualitatively you can, you can always sort of defend a price when you, when you see that someone has a unique skill in making it. So I feel that I feel that the primary market for Kunath's paintings is is reasonable, the paintings are not cheap. But you know, when you get a Kunath painting you never, you never, do not feel that it's been money well spent.
Jeppe Curth:When we look at the work from both an aesthetic and a financial perspective, how do you see Kunath's work fitting into a thoughtful, well-created art collection?
Nicholas Robinson:Well, I think that I think, I think that I think we've, I think we've covered that really. I mean, his paintings, as we've demonstrated, they are, you know, they're, they're exquisite objects. They are, they, they, they show a certain sort of deafness and technical facility that is, you know, really really up there. This is, these are like beautiful, sumptuous things to look at. Um, obviously, they, they, as I've said, they work from a, from a sort of a pure painting perspective, but they also work from a conceptual perspective. These are very contemporary objects, um, and so, you know, of course, if you're a contemporary art collector, you often have lots of quite diverse things or things that, at least you know, are very different to look at from each other.
Nicholas Robinson:I mean, kunath's paintings, you know, can, of course, exist comfortably alongside you know anything. I think that, like I, like I mentioned a second ago that they are, that they're reasonable, they're the his career, his, his price point is absolutely merited by his career and and arguably, prices, you know, could easily have been significantly higher, could even have been a hundred percent higher, and people wouldn't think, you know, oh, where did this price come from? I mean, he's had the trajectory where you could justifiably say, well, this is where he's got to. So you know, all of these things, of course, remain to be seen, but the trajectory, as we've demonstrated, is not over. It's now, hopefully for him and for his fans, you know about to come to a new level.
Jeppe Curth:So for someone who is new to Kunert's works, where or what would be the best way to start exploring them?
Nicholas Robinson:Well, I mean, I think obviously all of these galleries will have information about the exhibitions that they've hosted of his work.
Nicholas Robinson:Actually, there's a gallery that I forgot to mention, which is my mistake, but the first sort of big gallery that showed his work was uh, uh, bloom, uh, bloom and Poe, as it used to be, um.
Nicholas Robinson:They discovered his work, um, in Basel, in Art Basel, in the statements section, in 2003, which back then was like a real sort of I don't know, I don't know what you call it a real incubator for new talent and a place where galleries would be able to go and scout out things that they would really want to discover and explore working with.
Nicholas Robinson:So he showed, with them, and if you go to that gallery's website I mean, they've shown his work now probably a dozen times, certainly eight or nine, ten times over many years, and so if you look at the exhibitions, the exhibition pages that he's had with them on their website, you'll be able to see the visual progression of his work. You'll be able to see some of the more highly sophisticated sort of Wunderkammer installations that he has made, which have parlayed very well into institutional settings, and then, of course, you'll be able to see the press releases that accompany each of those shows for you to understand. You know thematically what he's trying to achieve with those exhibitions and how his ideas and his aesthetic have changed and developed and evolved really throughout the entirety of his mature working life.
Jeppe Curth:Yes, thank you, nick. I think we covered the most of Kuna. Do you have anything to add?
Nicholas Robinson:No, I think I think that pro, that's probably it. There's. Have anything to add? No, I think I think that pro, that's probably it. Um, there's. There's a quote that kunath has said, uh, or a statement that he's made about his own work, which I think is is kind of fun, and it really, to me at least, summarizes the way that he's able to, you know, hit the high nights, high notes and the low notes with the sort of tones of his painting. He said if I could place my painting somewhere between Oasis and Johann Sebastian Bach, I would be a happy man.
Jeppe Curth:Now, obviously, that's that's a mic drop.
Nicholas Robinson:Yeah, it is. It says well, we're credit to him for that. Of course, you know, I suppose only he could so humorously distill and reduce his entire sort of achievement into such a an entertaining little little phrase. But that's what he's done, and that's what you know, we, we think he does. So I suppose we could, we could say you know he, he should be a happy man because that's that's, that's what he's managed to do.
Jeppe Curth:Thank you, nick, once again for letting me picking your brain.
Nicholas Robinson:Thanks, yes, no, it's been a pleasure. We love Kunath and it's really nice to always think about what he does. Yes, we do so.
Jeppe Curth:if you have any questions you want to get in contact, please write to us at info at nordicaartpuddlescom. See you next time.