Michael Kunze

Kunze is one of Germany's most highly regarded artists, committed to the medium of painting since he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in the late 1980s and early 1990s; a period when the burgeoning possibilities of the internet and digital imaging were enthralling artists and painting was perceived as redundant. Kunze though realised that it was important to perceive subjects in light of their accompanying cultural connections in order to better understand them and our world today. Painting is an ancient medium but it is also a valuable contemporary tool, thanks to its plastic nature: for the more digital our world becomes, the more interesting it is to bring into focus the opposite. Moreover, painting gives the artist tremendous freedom. It enables him to bring together the real and the imagined, to cross time, to interpose personal memories with found imagery and to root these disparate sources in a ground and context of his choosing. Kunze has bucked the trend in a contemporary art world that takes its cue largely from a focus on Americanised pop culture. Rather, his paintings are undergirded by Central European intellectualism, often inspired by works from the 15th to the 18th Centuries, and driven by ideals and metaphysics. Kunze also eschews the received 'story' of modern art, preferring instead to look to what has been described as 'the Shadow-Line of Modernism', a kind of anti-modern modernity that traces an arc not via the avant garde, but from Nietzsche's tragedy studies and the isolated masters of painting in the 20th Century, such as Bacon, De Chirico and Balthus, through to influential directors such as Lars von Trier's. Kunze's complex architectonic worlds seem to hide many secrets. They are also paradoxical: the labyrinthine structures in the midst of Arcadian landscapes being at one and the same time arcane and futuristic. We sense that there is a certain reality here, but it is not one that we will find through physical exploration, but through the activation of our imagination.