KATHARINA WULFF · DAS KREISSHAUS

KATHARINA WULFF, born 1968 in Berlin, lives and works in Marrakech and Berlin. She studied ballet, worked in film and theatre and later studied painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Her works can be seen worldwide in numerous solo and group exhibitions and in renowned collections.

In her most comprehensive exhibition to date, Haus Mödrath is presenting works by Katharina Wulff from the 1990s to the present. This large-scale survey show brings her paintings and drawings together for the first time with her architecture – Mosharabi walls and ornamental cedar doors. In collaboration with Moroccan artisans, Katharina Wulff developed a new installation especially for the building’s attic consisting of coloured glass windows.

The exhibition’s title ‘Das Kreißhaus’ (Maternity Ward) references the history of the house, which was used in the early 1920s as a home for women in childbed. Katharina Wulff is interested in societal and social reality for which she finds a specific and tension-filled form of expression in her art. Her works point to certain art historical traditions, for example landscapes of the late 16th and 17th century while simultaneously citing modern art from Symbolism to New Objectivity and Surrealism and translating it into a very special, very personal contemporary visual language.

Katharina Wulff often selects such classic subject matters of paintings as the portrait, the landscape or the genre scene. Many of her paintings are characterised by anachronisms or stylistic contrasts. Because of their hairstyle or clothing, some of the figures make a timeless impression, seemingly deriving from 18th-century painting or the world of the theatre while others are dressed in very deliberately selected, often unconventionally combined fashions of the 20th and 21st century. Katharina Wulff paints some of the sections within a picture with particular clarity while other sections are only suggested, with some figures having no mouths or eyes; silhouettes vanish in the schematic.

Exposed but not revealed; the protagonists in her works appear in this way in imaginary landscapes or against the backdrop of urban scenarios. Katharina Wulff’s works visualise random or seemingly routine attitudes, actions and situations in occasionally disconcerting mysteriousness and other-worldliness. The architectonic arrangements and environments she has produced in recent years in collaboration with her family and craftspeople from the town where she lives contribute to an immersive and intense experience of her pictorial worlds.