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INTERVIEW Friedrich Kunath finds home in music, melancholy, motion at Pace Seoul
Friedrich Kunath's "The Most Beautiful World in the World" (2020) / Courtesy of Pace Gallery
By Lee Hae-rin
'The Nearest Faraway Place' transforms artist's restless life into emotionally charged paintings
German-born artist Friedrich Kunath has made a life out of movement, going from East Germany to Los Angeles and, more recently, bouncing between Berlin, Austria and other temporary homes. In his first solo exhibition with Pace Gallery in Seoul, that restlessness becomes a landscape of its own, with distant horizons, cinematic sunsets and an unresolved longing for home.
“The Nearest Faraway Place,” running through Oct. 24 at Pace Gallery in Itaewon, brings together new paintings and drawings that dwell on longing, melancholy and the search for home. The exhibition is Kunath’s second with Pace since joining the gallery’s program in 2025 and his first solo presentation in Seoul.
The title comes from an instrumental song by the Beach Boys, whose lush harmonies Kunath cited as a model for balancing beauty with darker emotional undercurrent. But it also names the contradiction at the center of his practice: feeling close while remaining irretrievably distant.
Friedrich Kunath / Courtesy of Pace Gallery
“I think it’s an inner condition,” Kunath said during an interview with The Korea Times, Saturday. “Right now, I feel I’m very far away from myself. But at the same time, when I’m walking through the gallery and seeing my work, I feel somewhat at peace and at home because they’re there like old friends.”
The exhibition’s landscapes feature disappearing roads, horizons hidden behind mountains, glowing sunsets and solitary figures. Pace said the works explore distance and relocation, tracing the tension that emerges from between where a person is and where they imagine they are meant to be.
That restlessness is not merely an artistic motif for him. Kunath said he moved constantly as a child and stopped counting after after roughly 78 moves. The habit of moving became so ingrained, he said, that he sometimes feels compelled to move on after remaining in one place for just a few years.
“Every half year, we were moving somewhere,” he said. “You grow up with this restlessness, and it becomes almost like a normal thing.”
Kunath now maintains a studio in Berlin, spends time at a house in the Austrian mountains and works in both Europe and Los Angeles while also traveling regularly. Berlin offers friends and social life, he said, while Austria gives him solitude, nature and the chance to cook and walk alone.
The question of home remains unresolved. “It really comes down to music, film, literature and friends,” he said. “Wherever I am, I try to cook for people, and then we can discuss life. We have music, we can talk about movies, relationships. In those moments, I truly feel at home.”
A view of “The Nearest Faraway Place,” Friedrich Kunath’s first solo exhibition in Seoul at Pace Gallery from Sept. 1 to Oct. 24 / Courtesy of Pace Gallery
This unsettled interior life runs through the exhibition. On the first floor, framed watercolor drawings convey what the gallery describes as a "fleeting urgency." Upstairs, oil paintings expand those tensions into cinematic landscapes.
Music, however, may be the clearest route into Kunath’s art world.
“Music is kind of like the air that I breathe,” he said. He listens to music “all the time,” and considers a melody a kind of soundtrack that changes the texture of ordinary life.
“Music has this limitless, super-democratic invitation that everybody can take part in,” he said. “The beauty of the three-minute song is that it can speak to everyone universally.”
The sunlit landscapes, sentimental skies and seemingly familiar beauty of his art is meant to draw viewers in before confronting them with loneliness, fragility or existential unease.
“My 'Trojan horse' is the sunset, the beautiful landscape,” he said. “I want to pull you in, and then we can discuss something really sad and existential.”
For Kunath, beauty is not a decorative escape from darkness but its necessary doorway. He compared the strategy to the Beach Boys’ harmonies, which conceal grief and trauma beneath a bright surface.
“Let’s find each other through beauty,” he said. “Even if it’s a false promise, I still feel like it’s my way of dealing.”
The exhibition runs from Tuesday to Oct. 24 at Pace Gallery.