KATHARINA WULFF

Wulff’s unique pictorial language melds absorbing beauty with elements of the grotesque. Girls and women—portrayed alone or in groups—populate her recent canvases, which train attention on her subjects’ externalcomportment while their inner lives are undisclosed. Seemingly placid scenes can be rattled by disconcertingdetails: solid bodies partially dissolve or seep into the surrounding atmosphere; a girls’ picnic is intruded uponby a bare leg among the trees. Wulff’s compositions are rooted in observation but layered with memories of herown youth in East Berlin, and her figures’ contained postures and averted gazes respect the awkward complexityof adolescence. Her heterodox style conjures disparate eras (Weimar working women, ’90s mall goths) and wearsits art historical lineage lightly, drawing on figurative traditions that range from the dark sophistication of PaulaRego to the urbane wit of Florine Stettheimer.

A pair of still lifes adapts that same temporal flux to a theater of objects, both appealing and fraught: the trompel’oeil fly on the surface of a canvas seems lifted from the Dutch Golden Age; a neon dog toy nestles next to apomegranate. The vanitas genre gives new inflection to the transience of youth and tempts an allegorical read,yet Wulff remains committed to registering social dynamics rather than symbolic conceits. “My painting is notescapism,” she has remarked: “I look at reality and begin to negotiate with it. As an empiricist, I am interestedin the world as it is, not as it is not.”

Courtesy Greene Naftali.