The first thing that hits you is the chaos. A hot-pink canvas exploding with caricatured figures. A yellow scrawl reading ZZOONG. A speech bubble insisting “This world needs more than a smile.” You laugh. Then you look closer, and the laugh catches in your throat.
David Gunderlach has been painting the chaos of the present tense for four decades. His work arrives at you like a city at rush hour: dense, overstimulated, occasionally tender, and impossible to ignore.
David Gunderlach – Feed me I am hungry, 50×50, mixed media, 2024
A Material Like No Other
Since discovering thick, durable plastic sheeting in 1985, Gunderlach has made it his near-exclusive support: two transparent layers suspended roughly five centimetres apart, creating a shallow stage between them. Paint applied to both surfaces bleeds and refracts against itself. Everyday objects, such as a toy figure, a gear, a mirror ball, are pinned in the gap like specimens of contemporary life pressed between glass. The result is something simultaneously painting, relief, and vitrine. Intimate yet confrontational. Playful yet absolutely serious.
David Gunderlach – Mom knows it better, 50×50, mixed media, 2024
Between Drawing and Abstraction
What makes Gunderlach’s work so immediately recognisable is the tension he holds between figuration and expressive chaos. Caricatural figures, loose, almost comic-strip faces and bodies outlined in confident black, emerge from fields of near-violent colour: burnt orange, acid green, magenta that practically vibrates off the surface. He works fast, and you feel it. Brushstrokes go in every direction at once. The eye finds no single place to rest. This is a mind at full throttle, the Buddhist concept he calls Monkey Mind made visible in paint.
David Gunderlach – Ohne Titel, 140×190, acryl on canvas mixed media, 2021
Language as the Spine
Words are not decoration when they appear in Gunderlach’s work; they are the core. Sometimes a single phrase anchors the entire composition: “Mom, you told me this world is a wonderful place,” appearing in a child’s handwriting beside an expressive portrait that is equal parts tenderness and grief.
Elsewhere, text becomes texture: dense poetic passages inscribed across the plexiglas layers, partially obscured by paint, forcing the viewer to lean in and read between the brushstrokes. The image illustrates the message, and the message deepens the image. Neither is sufficient without the other.
David Gunderlach – Untitled, 50×60, mixed media
New York Never Left
He spent a formative year in New York in 1987, performing in the galleries of Leo Castelli and Ilona Sonnabend, absorbing the energy of Basquiat, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and that city never fully left his canvases. His work has the rhythm of an urban street. A grid of deep cobalt panels holds the memory of the Berlin Wall. A city silhouette rendered in neon orange flames rises against a dark ground like a fever chart. A politician’s face becomes a shark’s grin. The satire is blunt, the emotion is raw, and somehow both land at once.
David Gunderlach – Starfi ghter II, 90×120, mixed media
David Gunderlach at DAF Cologne 2026
The same painter who can fill a large canvas with frenetic graffiti energy can, in the next room, strip everything back to near-silence: in “Transformation”, layered figures dissolve into one another across the plexiglas surfaces, the expressive chaos giving way to something slower, more contemplative. The turbulence and the stillness are both entirely his.
David Gunderlach brings a selection of works to the Discovery Art Fair Cologne, April 22–26, 2026.