The Nearest, Yet Farthest Place
 
Friedrich Kunath’s 《The Nearest Faraway Place》 is on view at Pace Seoul through October 24. The exhibition is Kunath’s second solo exhibition since joining Pace Gallery in 2025, and his first at Pace Seoul.
 
The exhibition unfolds around ideas of place and movement, longing and belonging. Its title, 《The Nearest Faraway Place》, brings two seemingly contradictory states—proximity and distance—into a single phrase. This paradox of “the nearest faraway place” distills recurring themes in Kunath’s practice: distance and memory, departure and return.

Landscapes Without a Visible Destination
 
Roads, mountains, horizons, sunsets, cars, and small figures recur throughout Kunath’s landscapes. Roads disappear around bends or behind hills, while figures look out across the scenes before them. Everything appears to be moving toward somewhere, yet the destination remains unclear.
 
The distance Kunath explores is not simply geographical. Speaking in connection with the Seoul exhibition, the artist has described moments when he feels far removed from himself, while being surrounded by his works in the gallery can feel like being among old friends—comfortable, familiar, almost like returning home.

A Sense of Home Shaped by Movement and Memory
 
This sensibility is closely connected to a life marked by continual movement. Kunath has relocated so many times that he eventually stopped counting, and he continues to work between Europe and Los Angeles.
 
For Kunath, “home” is therefore less a fixed address than a temporary condition shaped by music, film, literature, friendship, and memory.
 
The landscapes in this exhibition reflect that condition. Roads continue onward without revealing a clear destination. Figures seem to be moving and standing still at the same time, while horizons appear less like places that can be reached than images that continually recede into the distance.
 
 
 
Beauty as a “Trojan Horse”
 
What makes Kunath’s paintings especially compelling is the way they place emotional unease within images of striking beauty.
 
Sunsets, mountains, roads, and light appear romantic and cinematic. Yet this beauty does not remain merely an object of contemplation. Kunath uses such landscapes as a means of drawing viewers into the image.
 
He has described beautiful sunsets and landscapes as a kind of “Trojan horse”: they draw viewers into the picture, only to confront them with loneliness, anxiety, and deeper existential questions.

Where German Romanticism Meets American Popular Culture
 
Kunath’s work brings German Romanticism and American popular culture into the same visual field. German Romantic painting and the landscapes of the Hudson River School are freely combined with music, film, and personal memory.
 
Irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy coexist within the same image, while love and despair, hope and fear, melancholy and longing repeatedly intersect.
 
As a result, Kunath’s landscapes gradually move beyond the representation of actual places.
 
 
 
Landscape as Psychological Distance
 
His landscapes become psychological spaces formed between the self in the present and the place it longs to reach.
 
One question continues to surface throughout Kunath’s work:
 
Where is home? And does it necessarily have to be where we are standing now?
 
In Kunath’s landscapes, the nearest place can sometimes become the farthest away. A place shaped through memory and feeling can, at times, seem closer than one that physically exists.

About the Artist
 
Friedrich Kunath was born in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1974 and is currently based primarily in Los Angeles. He graduated from the Braunschweig University of Art in 1998 and has worked across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video.
 
His practice is known for freely combining German Romanticism and nineteenth-century landscape painting with American popular culture, music, film, and personal memory. Melancholy and humor, sincerity and irony often coexist within the same image as he continues to explore landscapes shaped by emotion and memory.
 
Kunath has recently presented solo exhibitions at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga, KINDL in Berlin, and G2 Kunsthalle in Leipzig. He joined Pace Gallery in 2025 and presented 《Aimless Love》, his first solo exhibition with the gallery, in New York that same year. The Seoul exhibition continues this recent development in his practice.
 
 
 
Pace Gallery
 
Founded in the United States in 1960, Pace Gallery is an international gallery known for its long-term relationships with major artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, it operates spaces across the United States, Europe, and Asia, presenting programs that span postwar and contemporary art.
 
Pace opened its permanent Seoul space in 2017, making it one of the earlier international galleries to establish a presence in Korea. In 2021, it expanded into the second and third floors of the Le Beige building in Hannam-dong, later adding a first-floor exhibition space and outdoor areas to further strengthen its Seoul presence.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: Friedrich Kunath, 《The Nearest Faraway Place》
Dates: September 1–October 24, 2026
Venue: Pace Gallery Seoul (267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul)
Website: Pace Gallery