Now on view
MEO WULF
DEATH TO ALL OF THEM
12 SEPTEMBER – 19 OCTOBER 2025
Robert Grunenberg is delighted to present the exhibition “Death to All of Them” by Meo Wulf.
MEO WULF
Death to All of Them
Robert Grunenberg
12.09.2025 – 19.10.2025
The non-binary artist Meo Wulf (b. 1992 in Hamburg) belongs to a generation that fuses influences from
dance, performance, theater, and scenography with the discourses of contemporary art. After completing actor’s training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, she took on roles in television and became a member of the ensemble at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Since 2019, she has studied Fine Arts with a focus on time-based media and performance at the Berlin University of the Arts
with Mathilde ter Heijne. Alongside theater engagements – most recently in Sybille Berg’s Es kann doch nur besser werden at the Berliner Ensemble – she developed her own works and a new, politically charged form of drag performance.
Her practice combines drag with absurdist theater, meme culture, agit-prop, lip-sync, and acrobatics. She critically addresses capitalism, class, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and the effects of social media and artificial intelligence. Unlike the hyper-aestheticized imagery of many contemporary drag stars, Wulf works with anarchic collage: dismantling and disrupting normative roles, gestures, languages, and even stereotypes within queer subculture. Her performances oscillate between political
monologues, epic lip-syncs, dance sequences, acrobatics, and slapstick.
With Death to all of them, Wulf presents her first solo exhibition. The title references a viral
moment in meme culture: in 2021, US talk show host Wendy Williams, during a segment on the Britney Spears guardianship scandal, exclaimed “death to all of them.” The shocking, uncontrolled outburst quickly became an internet meme and part of queer pop culture. In this context, it translates roughly to “death to the bourgeois” – a radical rejection of restrictive norms.
At the core of the exhibition are 200 mask-like head portraits. After performances, Wulf removed her make-up with white adhesive tape, which was then affixed to paper. The result is a hybrid between painting and collage, works that in their totality resemble death masks, skins, or relics. They also recall Marlene Dumas’ famous series Betrayal (1994), in which life and death, beauty and decay become inseparable. Each work in the panoramic hanging is accompanied by a QR code linking to the corresponding video sequence or original performance. Wulf’s masks are at once self-portraits and traces of performative incarnations: a visual diary of fleeting figures and discarded identities.
The works are displayed floating within frames, like relics or trophies. Their theatrical and collaged structure underscores the notion of identity as something constructed, performative, and never definitively fixed.
Meo Wulf was born in Hamburg, (DE), in 1992. She lives and works in Berlin (DE). She studies at the Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin.
Opening
11 September 2025
6 – 10 PM, 7:30 PM Performance
Exhibition on view
12.09.2025 – 19.10.2025
Performances
Thursday, 11.09.2025, 7:30 PM
Saturday, 13.09.2025, 7:30 PM
For more information, please contact the gallery: mail@robertgrunenberg.com
This exhibition is supported by
