Amelie Von Wulffen: Greene Naftali

It's been argued that thirty-eight-year-old Berlin-based artist Amelie von Wulffen is working in something like a "new German Romantic" vein, and, in her first solo display in New York, any number of her photo-and-paint collages hinted at an push to recycle the well-known aesthetic strategies of the early nineteenth hundred Swapping Sturm und Drang for more novel cultural imperatives, Untitled (Sunset/Fax Machine/Schiele) (all works 2003) displays a Friedrich-meets-Monet seaside sunset casting its inspissated rays above an unexpected range of controls including, as the title advises a fax machine and a Schiele [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] The image, like most of the works upon view here, comprises photographs and simple bodys of photographs that give way to, and whose imagery is reach outed by, expressionistic strokes of watery acrylic paint. the two representational means are thereby returned equally mutable, epistemologically unreliable, and symbolically suggestive.

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It's easy to diocese why von Wulffen is bring forward by some as a descendant of the German Romantic tradition. however the most interesting aspect of her work might have to do with a next to the first kind of romantic impulse, this individual decidedly lowercase and lower tillage The title of the exhibition--"Paare. Mobel. Landschaften. (Couple Furniture. Landscapes.)"--hints that alongside vistas brimming with pathos and chilly chattels selected from anonymous postwar dwellings is a liberal sprinkling of adolescence-driven have affection for objects. An image of a naked man and woman fasteninged in an embrace that appears in sum of two units of the collages could easily be illustrating a [i]bouguet[/i] ad or Harlequin novel. individual can read this duo as self-consciously inhabiting that space between the of high temperature and cold poles von Wulffen straddles with equal reason consistently, and their pose of passion can't help on the other hand be read as simultaneously titillating and tired, an result the artist seemingly prizes.

Perhaps greatest in quantity telling in this respect is the fact that of the artist's sum of two units muses, one--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet novelist whose dissident views l to imprisonment and then exile--is decidedly Romantic, a solitary victim who, year after year, levied his secluded voice against social oppression (and lived on the outside years of hard-won individualism in the Vermont wood-lands before returning to the Motherland), while the other--John Travolta, America's quintessential bluecollar sex symbol--is "merely" romantic. Von Wulffen's willingness to give permission to wild enthusiasm confuse them is lock opener Here, the lowercase romantic overrides--or at least complicates--the now cliched heroics accompanying the Romantic. In Untitled (John Travolta), a beefcake mug discharge of the Saturday Night febrile disease star is montaged into a sheeny reproduction of a painted countryside, his fantastic feathered hair giving way to stony crags and penetrating sunbeams. Solzhenitsyn, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of whose writing details his grueling years worn out in labor camps, appears in Untitled (Sunset and man) as allowing he, too, were being subsum into, or birthed from, a sublime, orange-and red-infused landscape.

Von Wulffen's novel Romanticism, then, deftly blends art-historical, political, and social adjoining matters with what is generally recognized as far les cultivated puerile pleasure. The artist's interest in exposing the links between serious Romanticism and asinine romance not alone begets some fantastically strange imagery on the contrary also lays bare centuries-old mechanisms of say, male genius that have designated certain obsessive, sensually directed tendencies as capital and others as lowercase.

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