Katharina Wulff Exhibition
Greene Naftali Gallery
This event has ended.
Greene Naftali announces an exhibition of new works by Berlin-born, Marrakech-based painter Katharina Wulff. This will be the artist's second solo show in New York. Wulff has been exhibiting in Europe for the past ten years and the current exhibition serves as a sequel to a show presented last spring at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne.
Wanwizzi's an archaic high-German word denoting a kind of hysteric whimsy, brings together a selection of portraits and landscapes resulting from Wulff's meticulously slow and additive working process. Loosely threaded from a vast, personal collection of references that range from symbolist painting, golden-age portrayals of glamour, and the artists everyday surroundings of the Moroccan landscape, the works are pervaded by a sense of luxe, calme and volupt.
Wulff's dreamlike depictions bear influence from a metaphysically inclined, classically informed visual language developed by such painters as Rousseau, Klossowski, Degas and Poussin, carried forward by Wulff's contemporaries Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik and Kai Althoff. Despite the presence of narrative elements, her paintings insist less on narrativity than on opening up waywardly esoteric spaces highly complex, beguiling tableaux woven from personal experience, references to contemporary visual culture and oblique symbolism. Following a dreamlike logic, the illusory surfaces of Wulff's phantasmagorias are often disrupted by physiological irregularities and formal disjunctions which call both to the materiality of her paintings and the deeply imaginative spaces she accesses in her work.
In addition to the paintings is a gallery of Wulff's delicate and highly intricate drawings. These works on paper at times serve as studies for the paintings, and explore her deeply fantastical subjects. Also for this exhibition, the artist's marked penchant for d袯r and sumptuous atmospheres is extended to the physical gallery space in the form of a scented Mosharabieh cedar lattice panel and doorways transformative space suggesting uprooted orientalism and a befittingly dramatic adornment for Wulff's enchantingly paranormal works.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2010 to October 16, 2010