New Work: Katharina Wulff

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Sept. 9

Katharina Wulff’s paintings are full of “mysterious characters and landscapes,” said Priscilla Frank in HuffingtonPost.com. The German painter’s first U.S. museum show assembles 20 works painted in a distinct style that “simultaneously recalls classical landscapes, surrealism, and the drawings of a committed daydreamer.” Influenced by painters as diverse as French symbolist Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, and Dorothea Tanning, her work exists “outside of contemporary trends yet seemingly beyond past movements as well.” Wulff’s “extremely distilled” landscapes conceal as much as they reveal, said Nick Mauss in Artforum. In her “bluntly framed” portraits, she “seals mouths, and blinds eyes with paint.” In Germany, a person who offers criticisms with a veil of politesse is said to be “speaking through a flower.” That seems to be Wulff’s mode of communication too.

“Most of Wulff’s canvases hint at scenarios from which she has subtracted or withheld something that might unriddle them,” said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. Her landscapes come across as illustrations for “an unfinished or half-forgotten fairy tale.” A surrealist at the core, Wulff “invites uncritical projection of fantasy on the viewer’s part.” But her demand that we fill in the blanks becomes tiresome; she relies on stylistic allusions in place of actual content. Occasionally, Wulff “seems to have so lost herself” in working one section of an image that the viewer follows her. In an untitled 2007 painting of a blue-skinned woman’s head, the “torrential blond curls” were clearly such a source of fascination to Wulff that we become fascinated too. Once you snap out of it, though, you long for art that “touches the real.”

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