Amelie von Wulffen
20 Aug - 16 Oct 2005
The German artist Amelie von Wulffen (b. 1966) engages in her collages, drawings and photographic manipulations in biographical research. Traumatic spaces, ruins and remembered objects span an imaginary and yearning network of co-ordinates set between the Russian dissident Solzhenitsyn, the adolescent girls' heartthrob John Travolta or Amelie von Wulffen's own grandmother. She always makes sure that the experiential context has its correct historical dimensions: "It was only reconstructing influences," said the artist when speaking of the 70s and 80s, "and looking for images that helped to give these years and my associations with them some shape, that really made it clear to me how very much this period was still a post-war period."
Amelie von Wulffen appropriates avant-garde practices in order to blend a whole range of realities together seamlessly, photography and painting on the one hand, official history and fictitious stories on the other. So fragments of quotations from Albrecht Dürer collide with Eduard Zimmermann, the avenger of all criminals from 'Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst' (File reference XY unsolved), and imagined memories, so that they can be addressed as national and xenophobic devices. In the series of city collages (1999), functionalistic East German architecture is splintered into Cubist sequences. Amelie von Wulffen's analysis of architecture was first of all an analysis of the specific urban development situation in Berlin, but above all of overall social determinisms and the immediate reality of her own life. Its social, economic, political and historical structural conditions materialize not least in built reality. For this reason the urban collages are not so much pure criticism of urbanism and functionalism as early sociological soundings into the science of autobiography.
Amelie von Wulffen's work has been seen at numerous international group exhibitions in recent years, including the Venice Biennale and the Manifesta in San Sebastian, and also recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Early work, as well as some that has never been shown at all, comes together in her first museum exhibition. The exhibition will appear later modified in the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf from 11 December 2005 to 19 February 2006.
www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
© Amelie von_Wulffen
Ohne Titel, 2000-2001
Acryl auf Papier, 126 x 184 cm, Sammlung Timmermanns, Köln
Amelie von Wulffen appropriates avant-garde practices in order to blend a whole range of realities together seamlessly, photography and painting on the one hand, official history and fictitious stories on the other. So fragments of quotations from Albrecht Dürer collide with Eduard Zimmermann, the avenger of all criminals from 'Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst' (File reference XY unsolved), and imagined memories, so that they can be addressed as national and xenophobic devices. In the series of city collages (1999), functionalistic East German architecture is splintered into Cubist sequences. Amelie von Wulffen's analysis of architecture was first of all an analysis of the specific urban development situation in Berlin, but above all of overall social determinisms and the immediate reality of her own life. Its social, economic, political and historical structural conditions materialize not least in built reality. For this reason the urban collages are not so much pure criticism of urbanism and functionalism as early sociological soundings into the science of autobiography.
Amelie von Wulffen's work has been seen at numerous international group exhibitions in recent years, including the Venice Biennale and the Manifesta in San Sebastian, and also recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Early work, as well as some that has never been shown at all, comes together in her first museum exhibition. The exhibition will appear later modified in the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf from 11 December 2005 to 19 February 2006.
www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
© Amelie von_Wulffen
Ohne Titel, 2000-2001
Acryl auf Papier, 126 x 184 cm, Sammlung Timmermanns, Köln