Katharina Wulff: Arabesques in Arabesques

The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is pleased to present Arabesques in Arabesques, the most comprehensive exhibition of work by the painter Katharina Wulff (b. 1968, Berlin) to date. The show includes paintings, drawings, and architecture from more than three decades of artistic activity. Based on observation in the broadest sense, Wulff’s meticulously composed tableaux of everyday scenes are realistic in the tradition of realism. They reflect her interest in landscapes, architecture, and people—their social position, clothing and attributes, physical bearing, and movements.

Featuring forty works from collections around the globe, the exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s oeuvre, which was shaped by the experience and memories of growing up in East Berlin, the Berlin art world in the 1990s, and the impact of the different cultures in which the artist has moved for many years. All these impulses are addressed individually or in a rich pastiche of past and present in which a figure is frequently placed on the edge or in the center of a narrative or portrait—sometimes as an observer, and other times as the focus of the image.

Wulff’s repeated inclusion and layering of such encounters, archival material, and memories imbues her work with a timeless quality and makes her visual worlds immediately accessible. The images result from the construction of relationships—between dimensions, proximity and escape, landscape and city, human beings and architecture—and in terms of social aspects, frequently in a human’s relationship to the world around them.

Since the early 1990s, Wulff has used these perspectives to develop a body of work that is shaped by its special sensitivity to the potentials of figurative painting as well as by its awareness of social dynamics and cultural influence. The exhibition traces this development from early, small formats and works with heavy impasto from the 1990s to the late, large-format narrative pictures, portraits, and landscape paintings.

The title Arabesques in Arabesques refers to the arabesque as a nonfigurative ornament that consists of intertwined flowers and derives from Arab architecture. Based on architecture from her paintings, Wulff designed benches for this exhibition. The opulence and fragrance of cedarwood stands in striking contrast to the Neoclassical style of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and its characteristic sequence of rooms as a gallery for paintings. 

Katharina Wulff (b. 1968 in Berlin) is based in Marrakech and Berlin. She was a ballet dancer, worked in various capacities in theater and film, and studied painting at the University of the Arts in Berlin in the 1990s. She has been a professor of painting at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf since winter semester 2020/21. Her works are exhibited all around the globe. In addition to the survey at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, her work will be shown in 2026 in a presentation at Greene Naftali in New York. Her work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at Brighton CCA, UK (2020); Haus Mödrath—Räume für Kunst, Kerpen, Germany (2019); Greene Naftali, New York, USA (2016); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (2014); and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA (2012).

Her works are part of the following collections, among others: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Katharina Wulff is represented by Galerie Buchholz (Cologne and Berlin), Galerie Neu (Berlin), and Greene Naftali (New York).

The exhibition is curated by Christina Lehnert.