Tatjana Doll

Having grown up in a Western Christian world, I automatically took over the language of images. I was always painting. I love painting because it is so clear and direct, so two-dimensional and appropriate to the questions that I bring up. I finished my studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1998 with a series of "Truck" paintings. It was a decisive point, as I decided to abandon biographical references.

Our current state of insecurity is internalized as a permanent desire to maintain stability, security, and the status quo. Painting affirms this desire of stability because it makes use of a common image alphabet, but it also can be a medium that confuses us, as what happens when, for example, a painting of a gas station sign is situated back at a real gas station. I often bring my works onto the street for photo shoots or I put them in an exhibitive environment that liberates the paintings from being placed onto the walls as jewels. I create large-scale paintings, 18 meters at the longest. The figurative subject is always squeezed onto the panels. I work with recurring subjects, which at the moment are divided into:

• groups of vehicles including trucks, special cars like the Hummer and the Mini, airplanes, trains, and all means of transportation that are a part of the economics and logistics of the Western world;
• groups of containers and blocks installed parasitically in our architecture;
• groups of seats for stadiums and cinemas that define a person as countable and chargeable;
• groups of everyday urban signage that denote the very presence of a state apparatus.

For my paintings I always use enamel paints, which are offered everywhere. I do not invent as painter, I simply use preexisting forms that are already two-dimensional. I prefer to use advertisements of the objects when working out the painting. Painting, like the objects it reproduces, is a consumer product in itself. The unity of the two is part of my way of looking at the problem. The "Hummer" paintings were quite successful. I painted them in New York, and the construction workers working in front of my studio window at P.S.1 liked them a lot. I photographed them on the street. They were displayed in the exhibition Visa for Thirteen at P.S.1. and in art fairs. I realized that this object is already an icon. While we know that the Hummer derives from a vehicle originally designed to function in war zones, we have facilitated its migration into everyday life as a dysfunctional luxury good that covers up personalized paranoias. It is a good example of our new economy of prosthetics.

Tatjana Doll was born in 1970 in Burgsteinfurt, Germany. She lives and works in Berlin.