‘This is How it Happened’ is an artist book dedicated to a body of comic watercolour works by Amelie von Wulffen. She paints a bucolic world inhabited by fruits, vegetables, sausages, tools, and paintbrushes that revives the traditional genre of children’s books. But the series s enchanting style belies its deeply serious themes isolation and violence, discipline and failure, trauma and humiliation. 

Amelie von Wulffen (b. 1966) lives and works in Berlin. She is best known for her ravishing fragmentary pictures, which use the techniques of drawing, painting, and collage, often within a single work. Her recent solo exhibitions include Kunstraum Innsbruck (2009), Kunstmuseum Basel and Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2006), and Centre Pompidou (2005). ‘This is How it Happened’ is published on the occasion of her exhibition in 2011 at Alex Zachary, New York.