Olaf Kühnemann

2021-present: Creative Director at LABA Berlin Artist Fellowship Program.

In 2016, some of these works were shown in the exhibition Open Sketchbooks at the Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, that was curated by Orly Maiberg. The art critic Uzi Tzur wrote in Haaretz newspaper: "Kühnemann's sketchbook is particularly beautiful and sensitive. You can recognize the organic transition from the materialistic patchiness, that almost seems to be random, to the creation of the appearance, image, when the pencil sketch brings life to the array of spots, tells a tiny story with an element of movement and warmth. In every page of the sketchbook, the artists' natural and exemplary sense of composition is noticeable, the laying of the spots, the weighing between them and the rectangle page, the greasy and dry, the cold and the hot, and the touch of linear drawing upon the spots as the touch of creation."

In 2015, he was accepted to Künstlerhaus Bethanien residency program in Berlin. During his 15 months of participating in the program, he produced over 1000 A4 size works on paper. This time, the series of works contained tensions between two tendencies: intuitiveness and expressiveness alongside daily work discipline and focusing on a single size of paper; basic and almost childish images (a boat, sun, a bird, a flower, an ocean) alongside uncensored pornographic scenes.

In the 2014 Turpentine Dreams exhibition, that was held at the Fienberg Projects gallery in Tel Aviv, Kühnemann displayed a group of paintings which were the result of his search for a new visual language. At this stage, he completely detached himself from photos and external images, and consciously attempted to paint without creating a narrative or images that might be recognized and related. "Kühnemann is seemingly undermining the visual expertise he has accumulated, and creates paintings mediating between abstraction and delusion," wrote the exhibition's curator, Yam Hameiri. "On the canvas, with many layers of paint, he creates manual, unique, naïve and sophisticated gestures that mix together to create a feeling of urgency and heat that is lacking in narrative.[1]"

The main exhibition representing his work during this period is Balancing Acts, 2011, at the Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv. In a review of the exhibition for Haaretz newspaper, Smadar Sheffi wrote: "Olaf Kühnemann's solo exhibition at the Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv, is a sort of group exhibition by one man, in which he exhibits a colorful multiplicity of styles. The proximity between the figurative and abstract in Kühnemann's work is so great, that it seems like this is what he's referring to with the exhibition's name, 'Balancing Acts', alluding to an attempt at creating a general and balancing statement between shape, image and narrative... Kühnemann is not an artist who went through a sharp change of style. Like his paintings, that feel somewhat organic, his work's gradual change as it is presented in this exhibition also holds new possibilities for painting, that Kühnemann has yet to explore."

In early 2009, Kühnemann had his first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany, titled Schichten (layers). Several of the paintings in the exhibition had already been displayed in different exhibitions in Israel; others were created for this purpose.

Another major exhibition of this period was held at the Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin|Beijing in Berlin. Kühnemann showed two groups of paintings in the exhibition: large scale paintings on wood from 2007–2008, alongside paintings in which the photographs are only a conceptual point of reference, falling apart into abstraction.

2007–2009: Avni institute of Art and Design, Tel Aviv, Israel.

Main exhibitions during that period included Family Papers (It's Me: Auto/Biography), 2005, at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; Homescapes, 2007, at The Heder Gallery, Tel Aviv; Displacements, 2007, at the Bat Yam Museum of Contemporary Art; The Rear, 2007, at The first Herzliya Biennial; Israeli Art From The Collection, 2007, Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Family, Tree, 2008, at Gallery 39, Tel Aviv; Family Traces, 2009, at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

2003–2009: HaMidrasha Faculty of the Arts, Kfar-Sava, Israel.

Kühnemann's work between 2000 and 2009 was based on observations of family photographs from the different stages of his and his family's lives (Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Israel, The Netherlands, The United States).

In 1994 he returned to Israel and joined the Givon Art Gallery as a gallery assistant. The eight years he spent working alongside established Israeli artists like Moshe Gershuni, Micha Ullman, Yair Garbuz, Uri Katzenstein, Raffi Lavie and others, were important and meaningful to his integration into Israeli art, and have been extremely influential for his future artistic path.

In Herzliya, Israel, Olaf met his first art teacher, the sculptor Zvi Lachman. During his childhood and early adulthood he studied painting with Lachman, and over the years became an apprentice in his studio. During 1987–1988 Kühnemann studied for a year at the Anthroposophical high school Michael Hall in East Sussex England, after which he returned to Israel. At the age of 18, he moved to New York. Upon his arrival he first studied privately with the painter David Paulson, after which he continued to the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1990–1992), under the guidance of Rosemarie Beck, Ruth Miller and Bruce Gagnier, among others. Upon graduating from New York Studio School, Kühnemann started his master's degree at the Parsons School of Design (1992–1994), where he completed his MFA under the guidance of Glen Goldberg, Bruce Gagnier and Esteban Vicente, among others.

Olaf Kühnemann (born 24 November 1972) is an Israeli-German painter, winner of the Isracard and Tel Aviv Museum of Art Prize of 2008, and was included in the juror's pick of the 2014 Thames & Hudson publishing's book, "100 Painters of Tomorrow". Kühnemann lives and works between Berlin and Tel Aviv.

Olaf Kühnemann was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1972 to German parents Markus and Christiane. Until the age of four, he was raised in Arlesheim, Basel, in a family that was greatly affected by Anthroposophy – on which the belief and occupation of both of his parents were based. Following the divorce of his parents and the second marriage of his mother to the Israeli professor Shimon Levi, the family moved to Montreal, Canada, in 1977, and to Herzliya, Israel, in 1980.