Coming Soon: Katharina Wulff

The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is pleased to present Arabesken in Arabesken (Arabesques Within Arabesques), the most comprehensive exhibition of work by the painter Katharina Wulff (b. 1968, Berlin) to date.

The show includes paintings, drawings, and architecture from more than three decades of artistic activity. Based on observation in the broadest sense, Wulff’s meticulously composed tableaux of everyday scenes are realistic in the tradition of realism. They reflect her interest in landscapes, architecture, and people—their social position, clothing and attributes, physical bearing, and movements.

Featuring forty works from collections around the globe, the exhibition provides a concentrated overview of the artist’s oeuvre, which was shaped by the experience and memories of growing up in East Berlin, the Berlin art world in the 1990s, and the impact of the different cultures in which the artist has moved for many years. All these impulses are addressed individually or in a rich pastiche of past and present in which a figure is frequently placed on the edge or in the center of a narrative or portrait—sometimes as an observer, and other times as the focus of the image. 

Wulff’s repeated inclusion and layering of such encounters, archival material, and memories imbues her work with a timeless quality, providing access that is tangible yet always remains disconnected from the reality of the viewer. Katharina Wulff’s drawings, portraits, and stories have their own visual language and operate as reflections on perception, memory, and social spaces. Her works are dedicated to exploring figurative painting: composition, visual narrative, and—in her early work—style. The images result from the construction of relationships—between dimensions, proximity and escape, landscape and city, human beings and architecture—and in terms of social aspects, frequently in a woman’s relationship to the world around her.

Since the early 1990s, Wulff has used these perspectives to develop a body of work that is shaped by its special sensitivity to the potentials of figurative painting as well as by its awareness of social dynamics and cultural influence.

The exhibition title Arabesken in Arabesken (Arabesques Within Arabesques) refers to the arabesque as a nonfigurative ornament that consists of intertwined flowers. In Arab architecture, the arabesque serves to fill rectangular surfaces on pilasters and friezes. Based on architecture from her pictures, Wulf designed two new benches for the Kunsthalle for this exhibition. The opulence and fragrance of cedarwood stands in striking contrast to the Neoclassical style of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and its characteristic sequence of rooms as a gallery for paintings. 

Katharina Wulff: Grand Hotel Tazi, 2016, courtesy: the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin

Katharina Wulff: The Woolgatherer / Der Tagträumer, 2005, courtesy: the artist, Sammlung Alexander Schröder