MUNICH.- The Pinakothek der Moderne is dedicating a major exhibition to the work of Amelie von Wulffen (born 1966 in Breitenbrunn/Bavaria, lives and works in Berlin). Around 20 paintings on canvas, 60 works on paper, pieces of furniture, and a film forcibly underscore Wulffen’s free understanding of painting.

After exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, and the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, the Munich exhibition is the first museum retrospective of the artist’s works in Germany.

Amelie von Wulffen established her name with collages that combined painting with photographs, some found, some taken herself. The result were mysterious congruencies of visual experiences of personal and societal relevance. Underlying even her early works is an intent that continues to shape her work today: the clear and deliberate desire to expand the possibilities of painting.

In the artist’s more recent work, collage transforms into painting, whenever landscape motifs, portraits, and elements of still life appear, all executed in a wide variety of painting techniques. Some elements are rendered as if in close-up, while others seem alienated through fragmentation or over-painting.

Art-historical subjects, including from Goya, Courbet and Marées, Van Gogh and Beckmann – sometimes even these artists’ portraits of themselves – are brought into synergetic interplay with craft traditions and techniques from the decorative arts, such as the facade frescoing on Alpine houses ( Lüftlmalerei ), batik, and paint-dipping.

Amelie von Wulffen treats old-master, modern, commercial, and folk painting techniques as all equally valid, and thus gives rise to new narrative relationships that break stereotypes and expectations. In von Wulffen’s eyes nothing is sacred – and some self-conscious painterly gestures are refracted in her pictures through the prism of (self-)irony.

'Am kühlen Tisch' (At the Cool Table) is the title of a 2013 video piece, composed of stills of figures, roughly drawn in pencil, that speak of a life in art and the art world. The figures’ obsessions and embarrassing encounters give rise to a series of comic situations that reveal their vulnerability and ordinary humanity.

Along with the film, a group of painted school chairs is also on display, on which visitors are free to take a rest. These artistically painted functional objects from the classroom can be interpreted as a hint that one should view the self in a state of perpetual, unbiased learning, not merely regarding aesthetics, but also social values.