Michael Kunze, Tick
20 Nov - 18 Dec 2010
Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to announce the exhibition “Tick” with new works by Michael Kunze (born in 1961 in Munich).
Sun shades, empty swimming pools, sparse, fantasy and ruin landscapes reminiscent of classical antiquity, with a stage-like theatricality – in Michael Kunze’s pictorial worlds, the correlations seem mysterious and surreal, and moreover the constructions’ functionality remains at least questionable. A painting style reminiscent of old masters, with echoes of large historical and world panoramas, are coupled with a repertory of motifs in an aesthetic inspired by the “Orbits of Fantasy” games, which seems absurd in this context. Michael Kunze stages encounters of seemingly incompatible things with a metaphorical blurriness, which makes a theoretical engagement with their philosophical and literary background necessary.
The new works can be grouped in two work groups, namely paintings with concrete figures, and paintings with imaginary landscapes containing architectural elements. The latter are based on The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus, where the protagonist Mersault, after his mother’s death, shoots an Arab after an argument and is subsequently condemned to death. The novella, set near the city of Tipasa close to Algiers, is characterised by the protagonist’s indifference and callousness that strike us as absurd, and together with The Myth of Sisyphos, it is one of the main works exploring Camus’ philosophy of the absurd. The second group of works refers to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968), where Michael Kunze discovers the figure of the stranger, albeit in an altered form. A mysterious, good-looking guest is taken in by a rich family whose monotonous life is marked by a lack of emotion. One by one, the family members, from the parents and the children to the maid, all fall for the young man, and after his departure, they break with their old habits. The stranger functions here in a kind of sequel as a liberator from lethargy. Both sources provide Kunze with the material for his visual worlds which meta-fictively melt with his own situation, the studio as a kind of über-site.
Allusions to these references are to be found not just in Kunze’s paintings and their titles, but also in his texts. (The current exhibition catalogue also contains a text by the artist.) Although these contribute to a better understanding of his intentions, they should by no means be understood as a kind of theoretical “instruction manual” for his painterly practice, but rather as an equally valid artistic expression.
The conjunction of different levels, the mixing of dream and reality, the conscious and unconscious, characterise Michael Kunze’s paintings. The result are palimpsest-like paintings with intricate theoretical layers of literary, art historical, and filmic references, through which the beholder has to dig – he or she is challenged to enter into a hermeneutic dialogue. Because, “painting is not interesting as painting,” Michael Kunze proclaims, “but painting as literature, literature as photography, photography as readymade, readymade as film, film as architecture, architecture as music, and so on.”
This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Gregor Jansen and Michael Kunze.
Sun shades, empty swimming pools, sparse, fantasy and ruin landscapes reminiscent of classical antiquity, with a stage-like theatricality – in Michael Kunze’s pictorial worlds, the correlations seem mysterious and surreal, and moreover the constructions’ functionality remains at least questionable. A painting style reminiscent of old masters, with echoes of large historical and world panoramas, are coupled with a repertory of motifs in an aesthetic inspired by the “Orbits of Fantasy” games, which seems absurd in this context. Michael Kunze stages encounters of seemingly incompatible things with a metaphorical blurriness, which makes a theoretical engagement with their philosophical and literary background necessary.
The new works can be grouped in two work groups, namely paintings with concrete figures, and paintings with imaginary landscapes containing architectural elements. The latter are based on The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus, where the protagonist Mersault, after his mother’s death, shoots an Arab after an argument and is subsequently condemned to death. The novella, set near the city of Tipasa close to Algiers, is characterised by the protagonist’s indifference and callousness that strike us as absurd, and together with The Myth of Sisyphos, it is one of the main works exploring Camus’ philosophy of the absurd. The second group of works refers to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968), where Michael Kunze discovers the figure of the stranger, albeit in an altered form. A mysterious, good-looking guest is taken in by a rich family whose monotonous life is marked by a lack of emotion. One by one, the family members, from the parents and the children to the maid, all fall for the young man, and after his departure, they break with their old habits. The stranger functions here in a kind of sequel as a liberator from lethargy. Both sources provide Kunze with the material for his visual worlds which meta-fictively melt with his own situation, the studio as a kind of über-site.
Allusions to these references are to be found not just in Kunze’s paintings and their titles, but also in his texts. (The current exhibition catalogue also contains a text by the artist.) Although these contribute to a better understanding of his intentions, they should by no means be understood as a kind of theoretical “instruction manual” for his painterly practice, but rather as an equally valid artistic expression.
The conjunction of different levels, the mixing of dream and reality, the conscious and unconscious, characterise Michael Kunze’s paintings. The result are palimpsest-like paintings with intricate theoretical layers of literary, art historical, and filmic references, through which the beholder has to dig – he or she is challenged to enter into a hermeneutic dialogue. Because, “painting is not interesting as painting,” Michael Kunze proclaims, “but painting as literature, literature as photography, photography as readymade, readymade as film, film as architecture, architecture as music, and so on.”
This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Gregor Jansen and Michael Kunze.