Amelie von Wulffen: Some Watercolours

In this small volume, normally-inanimate objects are brought to life by Amelie von Wulffen’s paint brush, moving throughout this strange, surreal universe as if they were real people. The result is a series of darkly funny paintings that shed light on our own mundane realities.

Since the 1990s, von Wulffen has created a sophisticated and unique oeuvre that enquires into the historic, economic, and social conditions of painting. Highly self-reflexive, von Wulffen’s practice expands to include the artist herself. She frequently appears in her own work in different guises, interweaving her family’s past with national history and existential questions about a specifically German cultural heritage. Von Wulffen’s works purposefully juxtapose aesthetic incongruities and combine different styles of painting from art history and amateur art to re-purpose their associative weight. In that respect, her work reads as a meta-reflection on the aesthetic incongruities of both post-war Germany as well as contemporary popular and political culture. This effect is compounded by the inclusion of references to decorative arts, furniture and architectural elements.