11 March 21, 7 pm
in English

“The comics proposed a state of fight or flight, an otherness from painting. What if something from a desk drawer, like a dairy, or from another room, maybe the bedroom, staggers into the gallery? Can painting survive the crack-up of the personal?” * In her essay Why Amelie von Wulffen Is Funny, painter Amy Sillman mentions the Freudian “joke-work” as a method of displacing and putting something out of place and how she sees it at play in the relationship between Amelie von Wulffen’s comics and paintings. The comics could be described as a means to displace the high and low, formal and informal, serious and funny, and as a shameless, comédie-humaine-style shedding of light to the backside of artistic production (or, the canvas) – to shame, pride, Schadenfreude, irritation, boredom and other petit bourgeois emotions.  

On the occasion of the newly published Collected Comics 2011-2020 accompanying Amelie von Wulffen’s solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, we present a digital slide show of the English version of At the Cool Table (Am kühlen Tisch), 2014. It will be introduced by artist Amy Sillman.   

Amy Sillman (*1955, Detroit, US) is an artist living in New York City working with large-scale paintings and drawings, installations, animations and writing.  Her paintings operate at the juncture between the abstract and the figurative. Complex layerings, often unfurled in long horizontal sequences, reflect on themes such as physicality, language and interrelativity, often with a manic and cartoonish effect. From 2015-2020, Sillman held a professorship at the Städelschule Frankfurt. Her work has been widely exhibited, amongst others at Arts Club of Chicago (2019); The Camden Arts Center, London (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015), as well as in group shows at the Lenbachhaus, Munich (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Tate Modern, London (2015) or MoMA, New York (2015). Sillman is represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York, and shows in Berlin at Capitain Petzel Galerie. 

* Amy Sillman, “Why Amelie von Wulffen Is Funny”, In: Amelie von Wulffen. Bilder/Works 1998-2016, Ausstellungskatalog Pinakothek der Moderne, München/Studio Voltaire, London, Koenig Books, London, 2017. Re-printed in Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, published by After 8 Books, Paris, 2020.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art
KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V.
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin