Against Interpretation: Friedrich Kunath and Naomi Fry in Conversation

Against Interpretation: Friedrich Kunath and Naomi Fry in Conversation

Artist Friedrich Kunath joins New Yorker writer Naomi Fry at Pace Gallery in New York for a wide-ranging conversation about everything other than art. Moderated by Pace’s chief curator Oliver Shultz, the evening’s conversation is prompted by Susan Sontag’s famous 1966 provocation: that interpretation amounts to “the revenge of the intellect upon art.” “To interpret,” wrote Sontag, “is to impoverish, to deplete the world.” Rejecting the need to locate meaning in art, the conversation will revolve around Kunath’s journey from his early life in East Germany to his last two decades spent in Los Angeles, exploring topics like music, film, popular culture, and tennis, and their connection to experiences (and feelings) of selfhood, itinerance, longing, and the sublime. The talk marks the publication of Friedrich Kunath: The Grand Tour, a new monographic publication from Phaidon/Monacelli on the artist’s work, which includes an essay by Fry, as well as the occasion of Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love, the artist’s solo exhibition of new paintings on view at Pace through December 20th, 2025.

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Naomi Fry is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about popular culture, books, and art. She is also a cohost of the magazine’s culture podcast, Critics at Large.

Friedrich Kunath works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video to create resonant, evocative, and often melancholy compositions. Based in Los Angeles since 2007, Kunath creates work grounded in his experiences on the West Coast of the United States and his enduring relationship to Europe. His art combines references to German Romanticism and American popular culture, and it is informed, in part, by his interests in music, tennis, cars, and the practice of collecting. Kunath's paintings depict vibrant landscapes of otherworldly beauty, and he often incorporates poetic phrases and quotations from music or film into his canvases, forging a visual language distinguished by interplays of wit, emotional depth, and cultural memory. The artist graduated from Braunschweig University of Arts, Germany, in 1998.

Oliver Shultz is Chief Curator at Pace Gallery and Director at 125 Newbury, Pace’s project space in New York. Before joining Pace, he was previously a curator at MoMA PS1, where he was part of the curatorial team on more than twenty exhibitions between 2015 and 2019. In 2014, he served as Fisher Curatorial Fellow in Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He received his PhD in art history from Stanford University in 2018, where he was the Hume Graduate Fellow in the Arts, with a doctoral dissertation on the work of Paul Thek. He has lectured widely, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Courtauld Institute in London, the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, Hunter College, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Yale, among others.

Event Details:

Thursday, December 11

6:30-8PM

Doors Open at 6PM

Location:

Pace Gallery

510 W 25th Street,

New York, NY

Seating is first come, first served with standing room available.

Please reach out to [email protected] with any questions.

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