Milan Kunc (Praag, 1944) is een Tsjechisch-Duits kunstschilder. Hij werd rond 1982 bekend met zijn werk tijdens de opkomst van de Nieuwe Wilden. Zijn werk werd in Nederland gepresenteerd door de Amsterdamse Galerie Riekje Swart. Hij had in 1984 een grote expositie in het Groninger Museum georganiseerd door Frans Haks.
Kunc studeerde van 1964 tot 1967 aan de kunstacademie in Praag. In 1969 emigreerde hij naar Duitsland, waar hij van 1970 tot 1975 aan de Kunstakademie Düsseldorf bij Joseph Beuys en Gerhard Richter afstudeerde.
In 1979 richtte hij samen met Peter Angermann en Jan Knap de kunstenaarsgroep Gruppe Normal op. Deze groep stelde zich ten doel algemeen begrijpelijke schilderijen te produceren.
Kunc woonde en werkte in Keulen, Rome en New York en hij keerde in 2004 terug naar Praag.
Zijn stijl is vrijzinnig figuratief en hij was daarmee vooral in de begintijd heel provocatief. Postmodern eclectisch, speels en ironiserend nam hij de conventies van het heersende kunstbedrijf op de korrel. Parodiërend op allerlei invloeden vanuit de populaire cultuur zoals straatkunst, reclame, stripverhalen en graffiti en met een vette knipoog naar het socialistisch realisme, schiep hij in de loop der jaren een hele stroom van humoristische, soms zoete en soms ook melodramatische, kunstwerken.
Recente tentoonstellingen van Milan Kunc zijn: ‘51 Years of Independent Revolutionary
Painting (1972-2023)’ Galerie Loeve&Co Paris, 2023; ‘Timeless’ Sofie van de Velde, Antwerp, 2022; ‘K-K Collection’, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, The Netherlands, 2022; ‘From Utopia to Dystopia and Back’, Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Switzerland, 2020; ‘The Show Must Go On’, Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, 2021; ‘Nur nichts anbrennen lassen’, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, 2020; ‘Marabu’, Badischer Kunstverein, Germany, 2019; ‘Neue Wilden, German Neo-expressionism from the 1980's’, Groninger Museum, 2016. Inventor, Milan Kunc is a Czech painter born in 1944 who has lived in Germany and Italy, as well as New York, where he settled with his friend George Condo in the 1980s. They shared the walls of Pat Hearn’s legendary gallery at a time when they had just been unveiled at the equally legendary Times Square Show, alongside Jenny Holzer, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kiki Smith.
Kunc has also been exhibited by Monika Sprüth and Robert Miller, collected by Gagosian and Bischofberger, and often shown in duo with Salvo. He co-founded the group Normal with Peter Angermann and Jan Knap.
Born in Prague before the end of the second world war, Kunc studied at the Academy of Arts there between 1964 and 1967. On the night of 20 to 21 August 1968, he was in prison, in the barracks where he was doing his military service, when the armed forces of five Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia.The episode, which went down in history as the Printemps de Prague, marked the end of belief in socialism with a human face. A sign of fate: in his cell, Kunc had an easel, a canvas and a tube of oil. That night, he painted a pair of faded military shoes, a pathetic echo of Van Gogh’s old shoes.. The following year, Kunc fled Prague for West Germany, Nuremberg and then Düsseldorf, where he joined the prestigious art school. There, he was surprised to discover that almost all the students were loudly proclaiming the Communism whose implacable harshness he himself had just experienced and from which he had fled. While his teachers, Joseph Beuys and then Gerhard Richter, were professing a conceptual, dry, arduous art, he was vibrating with empathy, humour and colour.
Kunc’s entire art has been forged in reaction to this melting pot of contradictions, compromises and submissiveness: an ontological anti-conformist, he dismisses all aesthetics and ideologies. His paintings in the Embarrassing Realism series, for example, flirt with the crusts of the earth and clearly go beyond not only good taste, but also political correctness, following the example of Magritte’s Période Vache, or certain works by Picabia or Kippenberger (who admired them). Totally atypical, Kunc is a virtuoso draughtsman and painter, paradoxically imbued with irony and idealism, whose exceptional and singular itinerary, from the tanks of the Red Army to the temples of contemporary Western aesthetics, By the end of the 1970s, he had already taken an interest in some of the major themes dominating art today, such as ecology, feminism, the denunciation of media and political formatting, totalitarian individualism and the affluent consumer society.
Initially perceived as part of the figuration libre, cultivated painting or new expressionism that dominated the art of the 1980s, Kunc’s painting is only now asserting its absolute singularity, making him one of the main precursors of the current revival of figuration.
Kunc’s career has led him to exhibit in a number of major venues. Recent exhibitions include: ‘51 Years of Independent Revolutionary
Painting (1972-2023)’ Galerie Loeve&Co Paris, 2023; ‘Timeless’ Sofie van de Velde, Antwerp, 2022; ‘K-K Collection’, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, The Netherlands, 2022; ‘From Utopia to Dystopia and Back’, Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Switzerland, 2020; ‘The Show Must Go On’, Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, 2021; ‘Nur nichts anbrennen lassen’, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, 2020; ‘Marabu’, Badischer Kunstverein, Germany, 2019; ‘Neue Wilden, German Neo-expressionism from the 1980's’, Groninger Museum, 2016.