Tatjana Danneberg at Salzburger Kunstverein

Artist: Tatjana Danneberg

Exhibition title: Wait a Minute

Venue: Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria

Date: May 8 – July 11, 2021

Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Salzburger Kunstverein

Tatjana Danneberg’s current work includes large-scale painting based on analogue photography, carefully selected from a personal archive. For her exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein―her first solo presentation at a public institution―Danneberg presents these new paintings together with a floor installation. Arising out of―and in reaction to―notions of identity-formation, especially in contemporary expressions of youth culture, her recent paintings convey―while simultaneously being themselves mired within―an overall uncertainty and unfixed sense of self.

In her work, Tatjana Danneberg uses the condition of the vast proliferation of images as her material while mainly eschewing the use of such images, transferring innocuous, enigmatic images between different processes and layers of materiality, engaging in staging and restaging their overall ambivalence and spelling out a state of affairs that surrounds us today.

The selection of images by the artist is an initial step in her production. From a large archive of personal photos and pictures that Tatjana Danneberg has collected for years—many of which are snapshots of friends and casual situations—she chose a small selection to become fastened into depiction in this exhibition.

The seven pictures in the exhibition, however, are like a collective anchor in appearing to be an immobilized selection of absolutely random images that could usually pass one by in digital scroll. This feeling of randomness in Danneberg’s pictures is poignant, at least for the very reason that their selection was made somewhat painstakingly by the artist and was not random decision-making at all. Alongside the large pictures, placed somewhat arbitrarily in the gallery space, are fifteen poster-collages that the artist herself also fashioned in a similar process of decision-making and image combination. The posters are scattered sadly, nonchalantly, as if having been rejected themselves— or indeed, past their time.

We might imagine that the proliferation of such imagery casts us all collectively further adrift in individual lifeboats on a vast sea of the spectacle of reproduced desire. Considering Danneberg’s exhibition, these conditions are echoed in the images, and moreover in the conscious destabilizing and liquidity of the images she transforms. After transitioning each one through her process of picture-making into these large -format canvases, the effect is all a bit dizzier in the end. The images are simultaneously washed out of meaning when lifted from photographic emulsion into paint and then re-formed by affixing them anew to a large canvas, emphasizing their ambivalence while also signaling a desire for meaning in this very gesture. The artist’s use of chance is not lost on us in this regard. She says that the images and their selection are “subject to chance, such as a casual moment captured through a snapshot, and I think it is this special directness that attracts me to using the camera as a tool for representation.”¹

Press Text with excerpts from Publication Text by Séamus Kealy

[1] Interview between the artist and Attilia Fattori Franchini.

Exhibition view, Tatjana Dannberg, “Wait a Minute“, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg 2021, Photo credit: Andrew Phelps, © Salzburger Kunstverein

Tatjana Danneberg, Confusion will be my epitaph, 2021, Ink-jet print, gesso, glue on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, Courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristhina/Brussels. Photo credit: Andrew Phelps

Tatjana Danneberg, Low Waist, 2021, Ink-jet print, gesso, glue on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, Courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristhina/Brussels. Photo credit: Andrew Phelps

Tatjana Danneberg, Manchmal ist mir heiß und manchmal kalt, 2021, Ink-jet print, gesso, glue on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, Courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristhina/Brussels. Photo credit: Andrew Phelps

Tatjana Danneberg, In alto mare, 2021, Ink-jet print, gesso, glue on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, Courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristhina/Brussels. Photo credit: Andrew Phelps

Tatjana Danneberg, Schlaraffenland, 2021, Ink-jet print, gesso, glue on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, Courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristhina/Brussels. Photo credit: Andrew Phelps

Tatjana Danneberg, Radiance Renewal, 2021, Ink-jet print, gesso, glue on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, Courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristhina/Brussels. Photo credit: Andrew Phelps

Tatjana Danneberg, Meine Waschmaschine schleudert nicht, 2021, Ink-jet print, gesso, glue on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, Courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristhina/Brussels. Photo credit: Andrew Phelps