Artists

Amelie von Wulffen

Press release

With Amelie von Wulffen Mon Amour, Oskar Weiss is pleased to announce the second exhibition in his Drawing Gallery. The exhibition showcasing drawings selected from the catalogue Drawings/Zeichnungen 2015–2025, opens on Friday, September 4 and is on view through October 31 at Sonneggstrasse 82. Through her work – paintings, sculptures, comics and drawings – Amelie von Wulffen (b. 1966, Breitenbrunn, Germany) sets the scene for dramas to unfold. With few but precise indications, she establishes a particular time and place while leaving the image open to shifts and conflicting realities. She balances abstraction with remarkable precision: it is found less in form than in the content itself, in distorted expectations and unexpected correlations. Personal experience is opened up and exceeds the purely private. Looking at her work can feel like reading a novel, as scenes and characters gradually accumulate without settling into a single reality. Personal memories, art history, domestic interiors and political realities flow freely through von Wulffen's work. Nothing seems to be off-limits, and everything is permitted to coexist. Butterflies with erect penises, a public swimming pool in the shape of a cross, a sadistic Heidi, sensitive werewolves, dancing screws in military helmets, defecating dogs and the artist herself glide past without interruption, as if carried along by a deep and greasy River Spree. Humour and melancholy are accompanied by a persistent unease: images never remain innocent, and reality is not allowed to appear as something stable or fully graspable. Drawing has long been an important part of von Wulffen's practice – not as preparation for her paintings, but as a medium in its own right, with its own material properties and inherent logic. Her earlier drawings belong to clearly defined groups of works: the anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables, the comics and the self-portraits collected in "Bitte keine heiße Asche einfüllen", for example. The drawings presented at Galerie Oskar Weiss are different. Selected from the publication Drawings/Zeichnungen 2015–2025, they do not form a group or series in themselves. Made at different times and under different circumstances, they resemble scattered diary entries rather than parts of a predetermined artistic project. Arising from memories, dreams and events, both experienced and imagined, the drawings result from a need to hold on to things that might otherwise disappear. Many were made without any certainty that they would ever be shown. This gives them a particular directness. They are less governed by the public and professional conditions surrounding painting and more closely connected to the private acts of experiencing, remembering and being. For von Wulffen, painting inevitably enters a larger conversation. The canvas addresses the architecture of the exhibition space as well as the history of painting itself. The brushstroke carries the weight of what has been painted before, and a painting is made with the intention of being seen. As she explains, it would be unbearable not to take part in this conversation – and repellent simply to transfer the language of the drawings onto canvas. The small format of the drawings offers a freer space for more immediate and unprocessed actions. Here, a rapid stroke can remain awkward, impulsive or unresolved without having to become a painterly gesture burdened by history, or initially even to declare itself as a work of art. The result is not romantic. The drawings can be tender, but their tenderness is unsentimental and sometimes harsh. There is also a distinct streak of bile. In one, a headless female patient lies on a male psychoanalyst's couch while discreetly pulling up her skirt. In another, von Wulffen depicts herself with her sister and their recently deceased father. The scene is rendered with an almost forensic objectivity, as though it were a courtroom drawing and the family itself were being called upon to give evidence. Elsewhere, there are extraordinarily moving portraits of her mother in a wheelchair and of a dying parent in a hospital bed. These images are loving without idealising their subjects. They remain close to bodily vulnerability, discomfort and loss. Throughout the drawings, the self is unstable: inflated and punctured again, sometimes within the same image. Tyrolean landscapes drift in and out, as do figures and icons from the comics of childhood. Images associated with innocence are stained, embarrassed or exposed. The drawings move through the shame attached to experiences that are at once ordinary and overwhelming: being born and dying; growing up; having authority over an animal; becoming successful, or not successful enough; owning property while being a socialist; witnessing poverty, gentrification, mass murder and the disappearance of insects; loving and being loved. These drawings do not offer a coherent account of a life. Instead, they preserve what might otherwise be forgotten or repressed: fleeting humiliations, family relations, erotic impulses, grief, dreams and uncomfortable observations. Taken together, they form a space in which existence can remain contradictory and the self can appear without first being made presentable. – Ditte Soria