Tatjana Danneberg
See You in the Funny Papers

13.05–14.06.2025

The newsprint not only determines the format and content references of the series, it also gives the images a firm foundation, from which they look out at us, layer by layer. Mostly taken from American newspapers, these are also known as ‘leisure pages’, ‘funny pages’ or just the ‘funnies’; they contain comics, crossword puzzles or Sudokus. They are thin, sometimes flesh-coloured, and carefully arranged in order. Later, enlarged during the printing process, they envelop the canvas like a skin, behind which is no other layer. The skin traditionally demarcates the outside from the inside; it is also associated with depth and corporeality. As far as painting is concerned, it leads us to the great questions of the medium, which demanded skill, ability and deception on the naked body. 

However, our ‘funnies’ are not ‘naked’, but full of ink, so they already have a first layer, soon to be followed by another, bringing colours and shapes into play with oil pastels. Tatjana Danneberg’s pictorial innovation involves several media with photography and foil printing, rounded off in a process with white colour (gesso), opening up new structures when formations emerge with cracks or tears. One could speak of the recurring glimpses we get between the layers, but also of things in plain sight. In this respect, the title of the exhibition, whose ‘See you’ is to be understood in the sense of ‘see you soon’, is also linked to abrupt and gradual ways of seeing: One can grasp all the layers together, or allow the moment of time, which is decisive for the production, to flow into sight, which positions the pictorial and the performative aspects of the production against one another. 

The works thus offer at least two interpretations. From a history of painting perspective, there is the dominance of colour structures between lines, connections or areas of colour, which, like abstract expressionism, advocate free form. A play of colours and forms can come to life here, although Danneberg’s work is hardly ‘pure’ painting, it is often corrupted by the diversity of media. Another historically motivated reading could see our newspaper pages as a modernist grid attempting to assert itself as the bearer of a rational structure despite limited visibility. 

At this point, one might ask about the understanding of space, of pictorial space, especially since we started from the body, which every skin has. In terms of time, we went through spaces that combined not bodies in space, but spaces in bodies. Compressed, they now result in images searching for an authenticity away from a flood of images, questioning viewing habits and suggesting a view of the world that is not a simple dichotomy, but is open and can make good use of the ‘funnies’. 

 Susanne Neuburger