Two expansive paintings of hotel lobbies in Katharina Wulff’s latest show reminded me of the recent TV adaptation of John LeCarré’s spy thriller The Night Manager, in which such liminal locales form the backdrop for covert skulduggery. Wulff’s spacious interiors, frosted with Moorish decoration, have a comparable atmosphere of mystery, as anonymous figures, their identities and relationships ambiguous, fade in and out of view. The artist’s interest in social space also extends to scenes of bustling gyms, where her formal distortions take on a more overtly erotic dimension.
A German artist who lives and works in Marrakech, Morocco, Wulff pursues the sort of eccentric, elastic figuration pioneered in the 1990s by her countryman Kai Althoff (who currently occupies, in typically chaotic style, the sixth floor of MoMA). Her images are similarly packed with curious detail and shifts in scale and viewpoint, juxtaposing and combining references to multiple periods and places without regard for a straightforward read. Inspired in significant part by Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit movement of the 1920s, Wulff conjures a fragile but absorbing world in which personalities and situations are colored by the specifics of their history and location, and are filtered through a singular aesthetic.