Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Ruprecht von Kaufmann’s 90-square-foot In-Laws’ House—the biggest piece in this sizable show—epitomizes the 32-year-old, Berlin-based artist’s ability to peel back the facade of “real” life to reveal the messy, dangerous, even creepy truth beneath. Suspended from the ceiling, it consists of swatches of wallpaper that von Kaufmann’s sister-in-law removed from her home during renovations. The artist has painted an idyllic house, complete with cat, on the old wallpaper’s discolored, embossed surface, but this side of the piece appears to be its back—and the wallpaper’s original backing, made from German newspapers dating from the 1920s to the 1950s—which has become its front. Snippets of text about Hitler’s exploits are still visible, but a curtain made of cut and painted garlands of translucent paper separates them from the viewer.

The other works on display are wall-mounted and more modest in scale, but their combinations of images and materials are frequently more unsettling: von Kaufmann turns discarded computer printouts into canvases; places a real, oozing insect over an ethereal, painted lily pad; and decorates silhouettes of human figures with phalanxes of curly-tailed monkeys. As he piles layer upon layer, the artist exposes connections between science and nightmare: A detailed diagram of a lamppost’s wiring pops into his bizarre piece The Will of Baron von Munchausen, for example, and the simulated equine X-ray in Hobby-Horse contains a human skeleton in the fetal position. “Bathosphere” includes a few overly sentimental false notes, but von Kaufmann’s eerie visions make it worth a visit.—Lauren Weinberg