Lot 51: FRIEDRICH KUNATH (B. 1974) German Engineering signed and dated ’Friedric

FRIEDRICH KUNATH (B. 1974) German Engineering signed and dated ’Friedrich Kunath 2009’ (on the overlap); signed and dated ’Friedrich Kunath 2009’ (on the stretcher) watercolour, gouache and acrylic on canvas 78æ x 118¿in. (200 x 300cm.) Executed in 2009

PROVENANCE: BQ Gallery, Berlin. Acquired from the above by the present owner. German Engineering, 2009, is a vast, dreamlike composition by Friedrich Kunath, a mercurial German artist whose tragicomic practice is heavily informed by his adopted hometown of Los Angeles. Spanning three metres in width, the work’s psychedelic watercolour background of pale pinks, blues, yellows and purples is overlaid with a delicate black line drawing. At the lower left is a section of unfnished train track; a man in a bowler hat stands next to it, suitcase at his feet, gazing into a galactic distance spattered with drips and splashes of paint. Above him is a huge, spherical swell of rain, each droplet carefully outlined in black ink, hovering above ground like a fock of starlings. What is he waiting forThis is a road to nowhere, an otherworldly space sufused with strange, melancholic beauty. ’I guess the colours got brighter and the topics got darker’, Kunath has said of his move to the West Coast: ’Sunshine and Noir. I live in a city where imagination meets reality and where the collective dreams of the world are being manufactured. It’s a fantastic and inspiring place to work and it helps me to go further into the back of my mind and take the elevator down to my heart’ (F. Kunath, quoted in S.Mann, ’Q & A with Artist Friedrich Kunath’, Hammer Museum blog, 12 July 2010, https://hammer.ucla.edu/blog/2010/07/q-a-with-artistfriedrich- kunath/). ’I can only refer to Werner Herzog, who said that the only artists left are those working in the circus. It might sound pathetic but I believe art chooses you and ideally you are in it for a gradual and lifelong construction of wonder and serenity’ –F. KUNATH