Friedrich Kunath Explores Intimacy and Wandering at Pace Seoul
A compelling new exhibition presents the artist's most introspective works alongside expansive paintings that chart two years of creative exploration, now on view through October.
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Pace Gallery’s Seoul location presents an intimate encounter with the contemplative practice of Friedrich Kunath, unveiling a carefully considered body of work that charts the artist’s inner landscape alongside his more expansive explorations of the world beyond. The exhibition, titled “The Nearest Faraway Place,” orchestrates a spatial dialogue between two distinct modes of creation, each occupying its own realm within the gallery’s thoughtfully designed architecture.
The lower floor houses a collection of delicate drawings executed in watercolour, works of remarkable intimacy that emanate the quality of handwritten pages from a private journal. Rendered with the utmost fragility across paper surfaces, these pieces were completed in single, concentrated sessions, lending them an immediacy and emotional authenticity that resonates with profound introspection. The artist describes these works as deeply personal expressions, each mark a whispered confession rather than a declaration.
The upper galleries reveal an altogether different impulse, one oriented toward the external world and its myriad complexities. Here, expansive paintings gesture outward, functioning as visual records of the past two years spent in contemplative wandering. These larger canvases possess a generative energy, translating the artist’s peripatetic observations into expressive, layered compositions that suggest both discovery and displacement.
This duality between inward reflection and outward projection forms the conceptual and emotional spine of the exhibition, inviting viewers to consider how artistic practice moves between solitude and engagement, between the intimate archive of personal experience and the shared language of visual communication. The spatial separation between the gallery’s levels becomes not merely architectural convenience but a meaningful curatorial choice, allowing each body of work to breathe within its own context whilst remaining intimately connected through the artist’s singular sensibility.
Pace Gallery’s Seoul gallery, located at 267 Itaewon ro, provides an elegant setting for this exploration of creativity in its most vulnerable and expansive forms. The exhibition remains on view through October 24, 2026, offering a precious opportunity to engage with an artist working at the intersection of private emotion and public expression.
Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).
