Miami has long been a complex, tangled landscape which continues to intrigue and beguile over four generations of visual artists. For Ernesto Kunde, transforming the mangroves, wild birds, and crackled Deco architecture into a physically viable format is a simple process. He displays a keen eye for interpreting his tropical surroundings maintaining a colloquial tone: the vital elements of Miami as a natural and urban biosphere are omnipresent for Kunde, appearing on cuts of canvas, found wood and corrugated aluminum. He infuses his work with a Pop Art sensibility, choosing highly saturated, contrasting tones with completely opaque shadow. Color gradients and differentials are just barely visible beneath intense layers of paint; the world may not be rendered in such stark appearances, but Kunde remains impressionable as each moment is firmly imprinted onto his mediums. Traces of Warhol, Prince, Ruscha and more contemporary practitioners such as Fiona Rae and Banksy populate the body of work. In a consistent state of experimentation and exploration, Kunde's own practice is developing under the watchful eyes of the Miami he knows....and doesn't know.

Ernesto Kunde was born in Paraíso do Sul, Brazil in 1973. After a brief stint re-discovering his family roots in Germany (where he worked in agriculture in Mosbach), Kunde returned to Brazil in 1995 where he first began his artistic journey by experimenting with works on paper: drawings and controlled coffee stains. Since then, Kunde has narrowed his aesthetic focus into painting on a diverse range of surfaces (most prominently found wood and canvas). Kunde has shown extensively throughout South Florida at venues such as the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Coral Gables Museum, Sardinas Gallery at St. Thomas University, the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Arthouse 429 in West Palm Beach, and the LIttle Haiti Cultural Center.  He has shown for several years during Art Basel at SCOPE Miami and Spectrum and at the 2014 and 2015 Wynwood Art Fairs.  His work has been featured in outlets such as Studio Visit (volume 22), artmiami.tv, The Sun-Sentinel and Irreversible Magazine.