NIKE

Pasinger Fabrik, Munich
May 10 – 27, 1990

Young Munich Painters
Group Show
Künstlerwerkstatt
Lothringer Straße, Munich
June 6 – August 1, 1990

In the wide spaces of the former Ritterwerke, there is an exhibit of the works of Eva Kunze from 1989/90. This, the second one-woman show by the young Munich artist, born in 1960, includes works on canvas and paper. Educated as a graphic artist, she changed direction very early towards her true passion, in which she is self-taught. While her early works are more representational and show human figures in the foreground, now the artist presents landscapes.

These are not conventional landscapes with settings taken from nature. They are symbolic, a sort of consecration of space. The landscapes of Eva Kunze express the moods of the human soul.

The artist creates these dense pictures through an inspired process. After working over the painting, and after the passage of time, a picture is then complete when an interesting message brings itself forth.

“I think pictures that simply gesture with form and color are boring.” (Eva Kunze)

The mostly mixed-media pictures (dispersion paint, acrylic, and colored pencil) seem decorative at first glance. But upon closer inspection one sees strong tensions and dualism of lights and darks, suggestive of Japanese ink drawings. And the strong black figuration stands out clearly from the earth tones and the accents of reds and blues.

Technology and nature are the two notes of Eva Kunze’s landscapes.

Everything technical, that human beings have made, and everything organic, that has developed on its own, are revealed in an abstracted and reduced state.

The landscapes can be seen as glimpses taken at one time from past, present, and future. “If these pictures weren’t already here yesterday, they could appear tomorrow, or both at the same time.” (Eva Kunze)

The viewer is confronted directly with what is occurring in these pictures. Like a photograph: here is the depiction of a particular situation, brought close with a zoom lens. In an undefined space that has no recognizable boundaries, but always depths, there are houses, chairs, ships, and living creatures – fish play a dominant role here – all united through water and endless clouds. Things float, dance, and play on all different spatial planes. Atmospheric weather is communicated with the help of radical changes of color.

Mysterious, dreamy, and a bit child-like, is the effect of Eva Kunze’s work.

The lively character of the pictures is underscored by an astonishing phenomenon: the colors glow in daylight, but in artificial light they are dismal and heavy.

The titles of the works are often little stories or sentences: Conceited to Death or Great Trembling with a Glimmer of Hope.

In order to make her painting more transparent, for the past year the painter has been working on a new project. Film, as another medium, can bring the painting and the emotionality closer to the observer.

A glimpse of this can be seen in collages assembled of Xeroxed copies of photographs.

Here Eva Kunze documents a part of her life. Her predilections for old houses and water are brought together in photographs. Houses in the process of demolition, in which the artist once lived and worked, and atmospheric images of the sea will be seen at a later date in a film. Bound with long sequences of the pictures, underscored with personal thoughts, they could become a meditative substitute for words.

One look at the only (so far) sculpture from this artist, a pile of bricks from “The Painter’s House,” shows the ever-returning theme.

“Reason is sleeping in old houses,” says Eva Kunze, in a criticism of the unreasonableness of our life today.