Amelie von Wulffen
born 1966
Amelie von Wulffen confronts the viewers with a peculiar, painterly eclecticism. On her canvases we can find references to Dutch masters, impressionists, 19th century landscape painting or kitschy genre scenes by German painters from the same period. Her paintings often feature characters borrowed from children's fairy tales: human-like creatures, fur animals, insects, or anthropomorphized fruits and vegetables. The artist places them in ambiguous situations of domination and submission, violence and helplessness, playfulness and shame. However, their dehumanization renders the scenes they are involved in seem humorous rather than anxiety ridden. At other times, her canvases are realistic. On one of them, a family of German peasants sits at a table; a small boy is wiping away tears while a black-and-white figure hovers over the group. In it, one can recognize the poet Paul Celan, the author of the ‘Fugue of Death’. A hidden motif in the German artist's works is the inherited guilt and trauma related to the silence of previous generations on the subject of their participation in Nazi crimes.
