Tatjana Doll
III BIII
15.05. – 25.06.2017

With the exhibition III BIII, the Kunsthalle is presenting the current winner of the Hannah Höch Prize for Painting 2016. This is not the first exhibition by the painter Tatjana Doll (born 1970) in the seaside city. She already showed her exhibition Beer for Oil in the Kunsthalle in 2005. The central work at the time was a painting of an oil tanker, around 15 m long and 4.5 m high, which took up the entire depth and height of the large exhibition space of the Kunsthalle in diagonals. With its unusual form of presentation, the motif of an everyday object and its unusual size, the painting was typical of the artist’s works, who had become known for realistic, if not detailed, paintings of Ferraris, garbage trucks, pictograms, weapons, airplanes and high-speed trains.

The artist’s painting style is typical, using glossy lacquer paints. The traces of the paint application are clearly visible. Painted quickly, over a large area and quickly, the surface treatment, wet on wet with all traces of the color gradient and irregularities, remains unadorned and visible. In its directness, this style of painting corresponds to the motifs. The combination of motif, format, painting style and the form of presentation results in something unusual and the representation of the everyday obvious through Tatjana Doll’s artistic transformation is irritating.

Recently, Tatjana Doll has turned to iconographic works from art history in her search for motifs in new series of pictures, such as the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso, the cowboy pictures by Richard Prince or works by Caspar David Friedrich and Sigmar Polke. These were not crude or simplified copies, but rather overpaintings or interpretative transfers in which Tatjana Doll places the historical motifs in new, current contexts.

For the current exhibition III BIII and the accompanying edition Parental Advisory, the artist is now working with motifs from the science fiction film District 9 (2009) and US underground hip hop. The themes, forms of expression and fictions of hip hop make up the freedom of art. It offers artists the productive freedom to design new worlds in texts, songs and images. And granting this freedom is in turn the prerequisite and achievement of liberal societies that allow each of their members to design wishes, ideas or options for new coexistence. But it is not easy to achieve this achievement, because granting freedom also requires dealing with and tolerating transgressions. The time, culture of discussion and tolerance required for this are currently under great pressure. The film District 9 by director Neill Blomkamp addresses, among other things, the limitation of freedoms, the fear of strangers and represents a direct political reference to the racist apartheid policy of the 1970s in South Africa.

Curated by Klaus Becké.