Tatjana Danneberg —
Something Happened

By experimenting with materials and processes for transferring images to canvas, Tatjana Danneberg transforms her candid analogue photographs into expressive paintings. Using point-and-shoot cameras, the artist seeks to prolong occasional memories by depicting relatives, acquaintances, and everyday objects in familiar and often intimate shots. Her technique for making the transition from photography to painting is fairly complex. The images are first enlarged and printed by inkjet onto sheets of plastic foil. They are then painted with gesso, left to dry and wetted again, before finally being separated from the foil and transferred to canvas. The final result is only known once the sheet is removed from the canvas. Revealing fragments of objects, everyday actions, or even a total absence of action, these images akin to amateur snapshots are transformed into a powerful pictorial gesture. The brushstrokes applied by the artist intuitively follow the composition of the photograph, adding movement while obscuring part of the image.

Tatjana Danneberg’s floor-to-ceiling works in the Studio are reminiscent of the torn posters found in urban space. Enlarged and superimposed on solid blocks of colour, the artist achieves a distancing effect from these intimate images. They become autonomous, creating a kind of paradox between two modes of vision—the meticulous and prolonged observation of the things that surround us and the passing curiosity provoked by advertising images that impose themselves on our gaze despite ourselves. By manipulating and deconstructing images, the artist questions the nature and status of photography, the way it is distributed and the value we attribute to it.

Tatjana Danneberg

Tatjana Danneberg was born in 1991 and lives and works in Vienna. She is a graduate of the Technical University in Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Salzburger Kunstverein (2021) and La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels (2020), as well as the galleries Galeria LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina, and Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw.