This career survey of the Berlin-based artist might leave you with a queasy stomach.
Amelie von Wulffen, Untitled, 2019, Oil on canvas, Courtesy the artist, and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna, Gio Marconi, Milan, and Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris
At the centre of this densely arranged, demanding exhibition is an enormous anthropomorphised turd. Feasting on its abject trail, dirty black flies the size of rats wait above walls and lurk in corners. Like so much of the work in this career survey of the Berlin-based Amelie von Wulffen, it could – or should – be funny, but it isn’t. Of the featured collages, drawings, assemblages, sculptures and oil paintings, it is the latter that are the most arresting, with their fraught mixture of folklore, still life and picturesque scenes of (grotesquely) idyllic Bavarian life – all seeped in the repressive shadow of German post-war guilt.
In many of them, ambiguous fairytale scenes point to an inner world where child and adult reality collide. On one canvas, a balloon-headed creature throttles a child while a white maggot wiggles in and out of its throat. In one corner, a honeybee figure lies on the floor in front of a matrixed honeycomb canvas, yellow nectar/ shit seeping out of its body and over the floor. Food for thought – and more food for those hovering black flies
Through May 2
