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Paintings, sculptures and drawings by German artist Amelie von Wulffen, mixing pop icons like Heidi and Maya the Bee with the darker undercurrents of German history.
Culturgest's own description lists the cast: Heidi, Maya the Bee, John Travolta and Wall's ice creams. They are the pop-culture icons that Amelie von Wulffen, born in Breitenbrunn in 1966, paints and draws into scenes alongside figures from conservative-bourgeois German life.
Her first show in Portugal fills Gallery 1 with more than 100 paintings, sculptures and drawings, mostly from the last decade. The curator says the eight rooms follow no chronology, theme or series. You walk in on a painted wardrobe facing a bench whose seat hides a watercolour of Paris, painted the day Nazi troops took the city in June 1940.
No reviews have appeared yet. In Room C you can take home the artist's essay Des Pudels Kern, which the curator calls the most important text about her work. Admission is €4 and free on Sundays. The remaining Saturday tours at 4pm are 7 November with Portuguese Sign Language, 16 January with audio description and 23 January with Ana Gonçalves.
تحت مقعدٍ مرسومٍ يختبئ عملٌ بالألوان المائية لباريس، أُنجز يوم دخلت القوات النازية المدينة عام 1940. تضع Amelie von Wulffen هايدي ومايا النحلة في مواجهة التاريخ الألماني عبر أكثر من مئة عمل، من دون ترتيب محدد.
The bench with Paris under its seat
In the first room, look under the seat of a 2008 painting-bench for a watercolour of Paris, the Opéra in the background, that hung in the artist's family home for years.
The Shit Spirit
In Room B a homunculus artist with a bum bag sells small shell sculptures from the tops of nautical painting-crates, and has wiped his brown hands on the wall.
Thirty-seven comic-like drawings
Room E holds 37 small watercolour-and-ink drawings that look like cartoons but tell no story, which the curator calls stray snapshots from a silent fable.
Ratzinger coming apart
In Room G the paint around Pope Joseph Ratzinger's face and smile breaks up into what the curator calls magma, a few steps from two portraits of the artist's mother.
Maya the Bee, deflated
In the last room Maya, whose author Waldemar Bonsels was a Nazi, sits stunned in a puddle of her own piss, among papier-mâché figures covered in flea-market paintings.
You want a clear story: the curator says the rooms follow no chronology, theme or series.
The video in Room F, At The Cool Table, contains sexually explicit material, and Culturgest recommends parental guidance.