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Amelie von Wulffen Paints Our Collective Subconscious
At KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, more than 250 works offer dark and eccentric makeovers of psychoanalysis and kitsch
Amelie von Wulffen’s exhibition at KW, her first institutional solo in Berlin, opens with ‘Die Graue Partizipation’ (The Grey Participation, 2001) – a series of faint, colourless sketches the artist made from photographs she had taken at concerts and club nights, mostly showing backs of heads and cropped limbs. It’s an elegantly tongue-in-cheek introduction to an artist best known for works that are the antithesis of grey and all its connotations. The title can be read as a reference to both the necessary partial presence of the one who wields the pen and the only half-mindedly engaged subjects she renders. The exterior world, it seems, looks sparse through Von Wulffen’s eyes. As such, the far more bombastic canvases in the subsequent rooms should be understood, rather, as interiors: how the world appears when reflected in our much wilder, more intricate collective subconscious.