The Edition

Tennis star Reilly Opelka was lunging back and forth across the Wimbledon tennis court this summer, lobbing the ball at his opponent, Brandon Nakashima. The stadium was still except for the grunts and screeches of tennis shoes. Nakashima seized control of the crucial moments and Opelka lost the match.

“Tennis is probably the loneliest sport,” the artist Friedrich Kunath told me as we sat Berlin’s Chateau Royale about a week after the tournament. “As an artist, you are also alone—very alone. Even if you have a team, you make the decisions. Both tennis players and artists are lonely capitalists, on the courts or in the studio, making decisions about life and surviving.”

Those who know Kunath, aged 51, know that he is obsessed with tennis. They’ll also likely know that he and 28-year-old Opelka are the best of friends. It may seem an unlikely duo at first glance, but both share a love for the other’s craft—Kunath is an avid player and Opelka is an art collector. They also share a desire to escape their chosen professions, even if just momentarily.

If it sounds odd that an established artist as busy as Kunath finds time to train a young tennis star, it fits well into the world-straddling, mind-bending cosmos of Kunath’s art. His paintings are at once sincere and cynical, sublime and absurd, fake and earnestly authentic. Sunsets, skyscapes, and landscapes underpin a delicate layer cake of pop-cultural and art-historical Easter eggs. Kunath’s rise has been sure and steady across the last decade, and he has built a robust studio practice steadied by institutional recognition, competitive pricing, and collectors in wait—10 buyers clamoring for every painting, according to one of his dealers, Marc Glimcher of Pace. In November, the artist will make his solo debut at the gallery’s New York location. His move to Pace earlier this year was a well-timed departure from Blum, which announced its closure just months later.

Some of his works are so deeply sentimental that they teeter on a razor’s edge of being overly so. “Some people ask me ‘Are you serious?,’ and I am like ‘Yeah, I am,’” he said, smiling in a way that left me with a tinge of doubt.

Right on cue, he showed his cards. “‘Look, if I draw a dolphin jumping out of the water, and call the painting I have restored my will to live again—trust me, I know,” he said. “I am eating the bait […]  When you deal with beauty or with even sincerity and love, you can only lose—unless you do it for a long time.”

Music Is Painting in the Air

The artist told me about a time when he was courtside for Opelka’s match against Rafael Nadal. Opelka was prodding Kunath for details about the painter Philip Guston. “He was about to go on the court, and he asked me about when Guston switched to painting masks,” he recalled. “It was deflection, a way to get away from the tennis world. That’s also what I was doing, being there.”

Their mutual respect also led Kunath to become Opelka’s tennis coach a few years ago. “The tennis people give us shit. The art people give us shit. It creates a weird confusion, which we both love,” he told me.

Despite his dedication to his craft, painting was not Kunath’s first love, nor was tennis. Often, he finds the spark of a work in music or film, a more “immediate” art form, he explained. People don’t cry enough in front of paintings, they don’t move people the way other art forms can. “Looking at a painting, there are so many intellectual frontiers you have to cross through,” he said. It’s no great wonder that he wanted, at certain points in his life, to be a filmmaker or a musician, “anywhere else where I could have that immediate connection.”

Though composer Sebastian Bach and director Éric Rohmer are among his key influences, “here I am, with fucking painting. It’s like driving with the handbrake on.” (He then reminded me that he’s not a painter.) Under his wry humor and emotional bait-and-switches, one can see his complexly rendered oil paintings are filled to their brim with a yearning for a feeling. The “engine” behind his work, Kunath said, is a desire for connection.

To be sure, Kunath is taking his own bait. He plays with the seriousness of painting, hanging in a space of contradiction. His fiery sunsets and panoramic views are all masterfully executed to the point of being photorealistic. Then, as in the work Goodbye Sadness (2024–25), a giraffe in a conductor’s hat pokes his head through the cloud of a nearly nighttime sky, seeming to be close enough to touch the just emerging crescent moon. Have Love, Will Travel (2025) features a view from the dashboard of a car on an autumnal day, with the trite words from the painting’s title microscopically painted into the sky.

But if you look long enough at any body of work by Kunath, you’ll arrive back at a score. At a show of his at Max Hetzler’s Berlin location last fall, a longtime gallery of Kunath’s, you could walk around the gallery with a curated playlist in your ears. It created a mood: there were the crooners, the pining lovers, and the outlaw country singers, like Townes van Zandt with his 1971 “To Live is to Fly,” telling listeners that Everything is not enough / And nothin’ is to much to bear. On the gallery wall, a skeleton sits beside a seaside mountain vista, weeping into its bare-bone hands, in the work God is the Space Between Us (2023).

A few songs later, Taylor Swift and Lana del Rey harmonize in their joint track “Snow on the Beach,” singing the lyrics weird but fucking beautiful. I’ll borrow those lines to describe the painting Only Lovers Left (2023–24) that depicts a pair of palm trees standing in the sea, holding hands, silhouetted against the horizon.

A Hopeful Romantic

The unabashed romanticism and melancholia make Kunath’s work feel like a diary left open on a table. He recalled that dealer Rosen once told him: “You know Freddie, in the end, it is always easier to say, ‘fuck you,’ and it’s always the hardest to say I love you.” It’s something that has stuck with him since. He first gained recognition in the early 2000s through support from L.A.-based Blum (then Blum and Poe) and New York dealer Andrea Rosen.

Glimcher, who co-represents the artist alongside Hetzler and Tim Van Leare, told me that vulnerability, frankness, and the medley of pop and art historical references are what draw such a wide breadth of people towards Kunath’s work. “If you intersect with any part of Freddie’s world, you’ll find a part of yourself there, in his paintings,” Glimcher said.

For the artist’s show at Pace, titled “Aimless Love,” his signature melancholia deepens in a suite of new works made between this year and last. Sunsets seem to be at the cusp of dusk. If It Comes Let It, If It Goes Let It shows a deep indigo-colored wave crashing on a beach just after the sun has dipped below the horizon. In We Can’t Afford to Stay the Same, a figure stands against a shoreline, a Rückenfigur reminiscent of one of his artist idols, German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Nature seems to be about to swallow him. I Owe You a Feeling depicts a residential landscape in Los Angeles, the Hollywood sign rewritten to reflect the title of the painting.

I asked Kunath for a few songs that have been on his mind in the making of this show. He sent several, including John Prine’s introspective “The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” which offsets the soaring beauty of “Avalon” by Roxy Music. He also texted a song by Lucio Battisti. It’s airy and conversational, with a light disco influence. “This is my everything,” Kunath messaged after, “especially because I don’t understand it.”

On the Move

Every painting in “Aimless Love” shows either nature or the painted subject in a transitory state, either coming or going somewhere. A tide comes in or a car nears a bend, about to disappear around the cliff-side highway. It tracks with Kunath’s own transient life. Based between Munich, the Austrian mountains, Los Angeles, and Berlin, Kunath seems nearly nomadic, and his German accent softened from years abroad.

But for most intents and purposes, L.A. is his main hub and where he keeps his multi-room studio, where each space has its own television and music system, which all play different content—a controlled syncopation to support his creative spontaneity. And, of course, there is the bar, Bar Va Bene, which guests can enter via a fire pole. Two neon lights, which flicker on either side of the long bar, are reflected and distorted by a mirrored ceiling: one says “Hello Sadness” and the other, “Goodbye Sadness.” Despite his extensive worldbuilding in L.A., he doesn’t rush to call California home—something that has always been a sort of vexing concept for him.

“All my life, there has been a dichotomy,” he said. “I grew up with communism, but I was introduced to capitalism at age 12.” Born in 1974 in Chemnitz, an East German town that was called Karl Marx Stadt at the time, Kunath described his youth dreamily in a “no-money, working-class intellectual” household with a Caspar David Friedrich poster on the wall. (As seen in We Can’t Afford to Stay the Same, Friedrich recurs in Kunath’s work. Oasis lyrics and American cartoons feature just as frequently.)

For many in Kunath’s generation, who were just teens when the Berlin Wall fell, life in East Germany was not political, it was a playground. “I grew up in utopian scenery—as a kid, East Germany was heaven,” he said. “We always had people around at my parent’s house—musicians, and all this. It was a miracle. Because of the oppression, we only had community. But once 1991 came around and you could read your files, you realized half of the people at our apartment were working for the Stasi.”

By then, the family had already left and headed to Braunschweig, a West German town where he spent the rest of his youth, failing in school, which is why his mother pushed him to take art classes. She was friends with the painter A.R. Penck and seeing an early show of his was formative for young Kunath. “He was playing a free jazz concert at his show in Chemnitz, he was totally drunk. I thought it was so cool,” he said. He then studied under one of Germany’s painter princes, Walter Dahn. Still, he wanted to be a pro skateboarder. He told me he had an illegal club space while living in the 1990s in Berlin, hence his love of techno and deep rave alongside the crooners.

Letters to the Unknown

In the late 2000s, Kunath flipped his paintbrush and started writing into wet oil paint with its handle—a gesture he referred to as “helpless experimentation.” This seemingly simple shift unlocked a new level in his painting practice. The childlike scratches onto the painting, often small enough that it is something you notice later, give the work a touch of magic: it’s as if the paintings have gained self-awareness, almost like when the brooms get up and start dancing and grabbing buckets in the Disney film Fantasia.

Kunath sees it as his “version of a letter to the unknown.” Often, his telephone number is scrawled on a canvas somewhere (an art historian, he told me, called him once and they still chat a few times a year).

That creative shift fueled the next chapter of his art career, one that brought him plenty of success. But, like a lot of artists, Kunath would rather not talk about the market. “I choose wisely who I work with,” he said. “But the fact that I can still sell a painting today is the result of the fact that I did not go nuts four years ago. In a moment where everyone wanted to go double on prices, I said ‘no way.’ I know two people who made it that way, but I also know 50 people who did not make it that way.”

The paintings are “modestly” priced between $100,000 and $400,000, according to Glimcher, given the strong demand. “Freddie and Tim [Blum] were so conservative about his pricing, and I’m politically aligned with it—especially in the primary market. Honestly, I think it’s a bit extreme in Freddie’s case,” said Glimcher, noting there will be some changes over time. “There’s a lot of room to grow.”

Glimcher thinks Kunath’s candor in his work is part of what is so resonant, especially right now. “Everybody’s struggling, it’s a 1990s feeling. That’s very relevant right now. We also had a market recession back then, too, and we have got one of those.”

He is not wrong. These are tough times, and everyone can relate to that, even if each person experiences it differently. For Kunath, it is that ability to hold in his paintings this sense of discomfort and vulnerability alongside pleasure and beauty. It gets at the heart of the human predicament.

At a show this summer, at a foundation Max-Ulrich Hetzler founded in Weidigen, Germany, Kunath wrote on a painting of the same title: I am okay by myself; it was paired with I am not okay by myself, which hung on a banner outside the institution. Somewhere in that liminal zone of existence, between dusk and dawn, wry and earnest, art and life, Kunath seems to be waiting for a phone call, or for a special guest to step into his bar. Somewhere there, too, he is serving a pass into the void, seeing what might come back.

“Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love” is on view at Pace, 510 West 25th Street, New York, New York, November 7–December 20, 2025.