Day and Night Before My Eyes

KATHARINA WULFF's paintings depict a haunting reality. Wulff emerged in the 1990s as one of the most significant German painters of her generation, alongside peers such as Kai Althoff, Lukas Duwenhögger, and Jutta Koether. Day and Night Before My Eyes marks the artist's fourth solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, featuring a new body of work that refines an elastic figuration all her own. 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' external comportment while their inner lives are undisclosed. Seemingly placid scenes can be rattled by disconcerting details: solid bodies partially dissolve or seep into the surrounding atmosphere; a girls' picnic is intruded upon by a bare leg among the trees. Wulff's compositions are rooted in observation but layered with memories of her own youth in East Berlin, and her figures' contained postures and averted gazes respect the awkward complexity of adolescence. Her heterodox style conjures disparate eras (Weimar working women, '90s mall goths) and wears its art historical lineage lightly, drawing on figurative traditions that range from the dark sophistication of Paula Rego 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 trompe l'oeil fly on the surface of a canvas seems lifted from the Dutch Golden Age; a neon dog toy nestles next to a pomegranate. 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 not escapism," she has remarked: "I look at reality and begin to negotiate with it. As an empiricist, I am interested in the world as it is, not as it is not."