Daniëla Wolfer's paintings seem to invite charges of weightlessness:
fetishizing pop-cultural ephemera like Sesame Street, celebrity DJs
and trash TV, her shiny Stuttgart-based tableaux are unapologetic
worlds away from the weighty concerns of a Polke or Richter. Yet these
glossy lacquers, some sprayed appropriately onto the aluminum-plated
boards often found on urban dance floors, are only superficially
superficial: by insouciantly sidestepping all things dour, they
transcend their local origins and speak directly to an increasingly
homogenized global youth culture.

Likewise, Amsterdam's new Upstream Gallery seems worlds away from the
city's Chelsea-like warren of galleries in the Jordaan. A smallish
white cube on a remote canal, it's not clamoring to be profiled in
Wallpaper, or host a workshop by a hip graphic design collective from
Reykjavik on the dangers of the virtual panopticon. In fact, like
Wolfer, Upstream seems to flaunt its lack of outré trappings,
presenting saleably-sized paintings on four bare walls (plus some
videos by Marc Bijl in the basement).

Wolfer is squarely part of what Germany refers to as Generation Golf
(known to the rest of the world as Generation X), and its obsessions
are boldly on display here: fashion, comics, vintage sci-fi -
aesthetic comfort food, all mixed brightly into childlike collages
that depict their central characters from many perspectives at once,
like remixes of themselves, infinitely resilient. It's as if these
paintings refuse to inhabit a world overflowing with digital
perfection and dirty bombs, preferring to seek authenticity in their
own irreproducibility, in the zoomed-in hands of a DJ twiddling knobs.
Like the flailing urban hipsters depicted in Untitled, they're either
being exploded into the world by an unknowable force, or deliberately
jumping into the fire below with youthful abandon.
DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER