Tatjana Danneberg’s works are indistinctly perceptible as fragments through strong distortions or enlargements of photographic motifs, deformations or actual tears. In large-format paintings, often based on photographs from the artist's personal archive, she addresses fleeting moments, rapid movements, even intimate situations, often with reference to bodily forms, but without unambiguity and always dynamic.

With the sculpture WOW, it’s different. The work seems static and although standing on delicate 'legs', set stably on the ground. Its shape is reminiscent of a symbol, familiar and yet difficult to name. In fact, the abstract, three-dimensional form is the interpretation of a mood.

WOW emerges from Tatjana Danneberg's preoccupation with the work of Bruno Munari (1907-1998). With his publication Design as Art (1966), the Italian multi-purpose artist wrote a kind of lexically compiled instruction manual for art, design, and architecture, which is still discussed today and sometimes controversially, especially on social media and the Internet. In one chapter, Munari links contours of faces to drawings. These forms, which are psychologically easy to perceive and consist of just a few strokes, are the basis for the representation of facial expressions, and thus also of feelings and representations of emotions or the intuitively perceptible recognition of moods. Tatjana Danneberg brings the simple graphic into the third dimension as an abstract sculpture.

The artist, who studied textual sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, applies stucco lustro or stucco veneziano here. This ancient craft technique means a brightly polished surface of stucco. Plaster is applied in light layers over and over again and polished. In the history of art and architecture, heavy and expensive marble was imitated in this way and used in many places. Tatjana Danneberg builds up a special conglomerate of different materials for WOW to create gloss and smoothness. In the evn collection, the work plays with the history of Modernism and catapults the formal language of classical, abstract sculptures à la Henry Moore into the present: from the visual language of the last century to a bold and fresh, mimicked form. WOW!

Heike Maier-Rieper, 2021 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)