Work   Information Biography

Surreal Scenes between Tragedy and Comedy

Kunert’s bizarre wonderlands relate stories of the depths of life. His constructions are reflections of our fears and needs, but also of our desires. They bring home the absurdity of the everyday: the grotesque attempts to organize our lives, the disappearance of old traditions, the way we deal with one another and with our history—Kunert’s small masterpieces harbour any number of things. He does not however do all this with an incriminating finger, but with a subtle, at times offbeat sense of humor. Buildings say something about people. They are the expression of our culture, our past, our present, and our future. The inner worlds of homes were in invariably are reflections of social zeitgeist and contain much of what goes on inside and around us. (...) Frank Kunert lends the traces of our past an appreciative framework, and his small worlds are an unconventional declaration of love to the hosts of stories of everyday life—our stories.

Elizabeth Clarke (from an essay of the photo book Wunderland)

Frank Kunert (b. 1963 in Frankfurt am Main) grew up in the Rhine-Main region and started taking photographs as a teenager, when he particularly was interested in landscape photography. After completing secondary school, he trained as a photographer and nurtured his love for studio work. He remains true to this pursuit even today and his focus has been on designing and photographing miniature scenes for a long time. He makes a good living from it and thus has numerous houses and cars—most of them on scales ranging from 1:12 to 1:43.

His works are regularly presented at exhibitions in Germany and abroad and have been published in Spiegel special, chrismon, DU – das Kulturmagazin, Der Standard, Photonews, Barbara, smith journal, and TGV magazine, among others. The artist received several awards, including the Heinrich Zille Caricature Prize, the silver medal at the Biennial Dimensional Salon in New York and the German Photo Book Award in silver. Frank Kunert is a member of the Professional Association of Visual Artists in Rhineland-Palatinate and the German Society for Photography (DGPh). He is married and lives with his wife in Boppard, between Cologne and Frankfurt.