UND Kunstzeitung für München

This issue’s cover picture comes from the work of self-taught painter Eva Kunze. She was born in Mannheim in 1963 and came to Munich in 1992, thanks to a Prince Luitpold Munich Scholarship. Although by that time she was by no means unknown here. For a good ten years she has exhibited her work in Munich (e.g. Künstlerwerkstatt Lothringerstraße, Pasinger Fabrik, Autorengalerie) and in other cities, most recently in Landshut. There, the Verein für aktuelle Kunst (Association for Current Art) runs the new Gallery in the Gothic Stadel on the Mühleninsel, which opened their year with an exhibition dedicated to Kunze titled In the beginning.
Ah, the turn of the Millennium! That’s what everyone will think. But I do not believe that this is what Eva Kunze meant. In the beginning, for her, means the original beginning, the creation of the world. Who knows how many eons ago that beginning took place? But the origin of life is always new, is always a new beginning. And that is what interests the artist with the beautiful name of Eve, Eve the first woman. She too grew from a fertilized egg cell of imperceptible size, developing in the microscopically small space as the prototype of a complex human being. Eva Kunze finds these forms of the microcosmos and paints them with a free hand according to her imagination, millions of times larger than they actually are. In their primeval soup, being and becoming. She is working on a cycle of paintings on this theme and will continue until she has exhausted her imagination.
Could such an imagination be better rendered than by tangible streams of color and forms, which constantly transform themselves in the fluid state of the growth process? Here the threads wind themselves into nourishing strands and propagate cell images, enfolding themselves in protective membranes until the gestalt is perfected, endowed with senses and controlled motion. The miracle of life. It makes us all small. Since we humans, as Bert Brecht so prosaically said, cannot even create a louse., the best we can do is to be thankful for this, in reverence, to protect it and, in humility, to recognize our own limitations. Artists do that. And that is how I see Eva’s art.
Elke Krüssmann writes in the catalog entry for this picture: “Here bits of red color melt into an amorphous fireball. Or pigments thicken before a glowing background into craggy structures. A game of transformations between surfaces and depths, structures and eternity.
As a matter of fact she has more than one involvement with color. Not only does she paint with her own self-mixed pigments, but she also teaches these techniques in seminars. Anyone interested in learning this can look into one of her courses.

JOHANNA KERSCHNER