Amelie von Wulffen’s paintings and drawings fuse the imaginary and the everyday, conjuring a world that is at once both winsome and poignant. The primary protagonist in these works is often the artist herself, surrounded by a web of narrative fragments, the connections between which are both highly individualized and richly suggestive. In her most recent works, von Wulffen deploys a host of painterly techniques to create works that, although they depart from the photographic collage practice for which she is best known, remain deeply referential.

Blending abstraction and figuration, Romanticism and psychedelia, von Wulffen’s large-scale paintings wryly revisit and reprocess tactics and tropes of modern painting from German Expressionism onward, while recent series of drawings have tweaked the conventions of the children’s book, the comic strip, and the storyboard, turning these formats into vehicles for her own psychologically charged narratives. Von Wulffen’s installations often exceed the boundaries of the canvas or page, extending into the exhibition space in the form of wall paintings and furniture that conjure images of bourgeois interiors and nod to modern art’s longstanding pas de deux between abstraction and decoration.

Von Wulffen’s exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum—her first solo exhibition in an American museum—will include a new body of paintings created during her time as the AAM’s 2012 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence.

Amelie von Wulffen was born in Breitenbrunn, Germany in 1966, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland; and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the 3rd Berlin Biennale in 2004.

Amelie von Wulffen’s Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence residency and exhibition are organized by the Aspen Art Museum and funded by Jane and Marc Nathanson. Additional funding is provided by the AAM National Council and Nicola and Jeff Marcus. Exhibition lectures are presented as part of the Questrom Lecture Series and educational outreach programming is made possible by the Questrom Education Fund.