For the Hammer Project’s current exhibition, German-born artist Friedrich Kunath has created a realm of comi-tragedies based around middle-aged men struggling to reconcile their imagined lives and unmet desires with the sharp reality of a mediocre existence. Employing as many mediums as he could (drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, even a neon sign reading “I am Goodbye”) Kunath chose to let his ideas spread out. Both walls of the lobby stairwell at LA’s Hammer Museum are filled with a hodge-podge of work in assorted sizes. The installation peaks with a series of soft, colorful washes overlaid with thin line drawings and silhouettes of nondescript men climbing staircases into eternity, slumped anxiously over an office desk, or popping stunned out of a jack-in-the-box, briefcase in hand. Each solitary male character appears slightly dazed or lost, caught midway between the world’s external confusion and the banality of everyday routine. Like a Saul Bellow character desperately proselytizing the meaning of life to an empty apartment, Kunath’s men are in the process of a tumultuous transition.