Interview with this year's ti&m art@work artist Tabea Martin

Tabea Martin

Tabea Martin was born in Basel in 1992. After training as a theater painter and working for four years at Theater Basel, she moved to Hamburg to study for her bachelor’s degree in illustration. She studied under Prof. Anke Feuchtenberger and Prof. Christian Hahn and took part in several exhibitions in Hamburg, including add art 2022, where she won the prize for young art. In her paintings, she deals with the question of the everyday and the mysteriousness of the “normal”. This also leads her to work with huge formats, such as the 10-x-3-meter painting that she presented at Jungkunst 2023 in Winterthur.

At our openings, you will exhibit your new works. What can we look forward to?

For my project “Durchblicken” (“Looking through”), I was inspired by desktops and screens; my painted canvases can be stacked and layered like the windows of a screen. I used screenshots from ti&m employees as a source of inspiration. The scenes I depict are based on home office moments. While making them, I asked myself: Who is looking at whom?

In your project, you relied on the cooperation of ti&m employees. What was your experience of this?

My concept is simple: I asked the employees to send me screenshots of their screens. Several employees responded to this request, but the biggest inspiration was a visit to the Basel office: the sketches I made there served as a template for the different formats I use and for the superimpositions of the works.

“I enjoyed taking the perspective of a webcam and looking at a scene when people are not working or not presenting themselves in the best light.”
– Tabea Martin

Did you already have an idea at the start of the project of what the work would look like in the end? Or did the result surprise you?

As I generally work based on gut feeling in my painting, I already thought the result might look completely different from what I had imagined at the beginning. And that’s what happened. Originally, I thought the screenshots of the employees would inspire the scenes I would paint. But for me, it’s important to start from my memories and experiences. So I started to combine these screenshots with my own experiences in the home office. I asked myself a new question: who is looking at whom? I enjoyed taking the perspective of a webcam and looking at a scene when the people were not working or not presenting themselves in the best light. I played around with the scenes, came up with new questions and was really surprised at the end by where it all led me.

How did you actually come up with the concept? Were there any events, people or places that influenced your idea?

I am constantly influenced by the people around me; my pictures are full of memories of places and spaces I have visited. The inspiration for this concept came from my studio neighbor, who placed his canvases on the wall in a somewhat strange stack. After observing this casually for a few days, I came up with the idea of connecting canvases and desktop windows.

“The inspiration for my art@work concept came from my studio neighbor, who placed his canvases on the wall in a somewhat strange stack. After casually observing this for a few days, I came up with the idea of connecting canvases and desktop windows.”
– Tabea Martin

What does your typical working day look like when you’re working on a project?

I usually sit in my studio in the morning and think about what I want to do that day. Sometimes it works wonderfully, then I can sketch, think up compositions and paint away. On other days, painting seems very tedious and I lack inspiration; then I concentrate on work that doesn’t require creativity. As I make my own paints and cover the stretcher frames myself, there is always a bit of hard work involved. In addition, I spend part of the week answering emails, organizing exhibitions and applying for project funding. I don’t have fixed working hours, but I try to put in my hours every day, even at the weekend or until after midnight.

Artists want to show the viewer new perspectives on the world through their work. Have you gained a new perspective on IT through art@work?

I have definitely dispelled the preconception that the combination of art and IT always leads to VR installations and AI-generated images. At first, I was skeptical as to whether I would find a personal approach to IT work, which is very important for my painting. But my project made me realize that the interaction between the digital world and the real world can be explored and artistically implemented in many different ways.

“art@work made me realize that the interaction between the digital world and the real world can be explored and artistically implemented in many different ways.”
– Tabea Martin

You trained as a theater painter and worked at Theater Basel for several years before studying illustration in Hamburg. Did you always want to become a freelance artist, or did that develop during your “theater days”?

I never actually wanted to become an artist; it just happened. My goal was to find a job where I could paint every day. My training as a theater painter was very fulfilling, but in my day-to-day work, I simply had to implement the stage designers’ wishes and had no influence on the creative process. I had a great desire to tell stories in pictures and explore the world around me. That’s why I wanted to study and have more time for my own painting. During my illustration studies, I mainly focused on free painting, which led to me exhibiting a lot and enabled me to become self-employed.

“Durchblicken” (“Looking through”) – art@work 2024

Who is looking at whom? The digital world connects people sitting in front of screens every day, whether at home or in the office. They look at the screen, move windows back and forth on the desktop, stack and rescale them, and click them away again. We access the digital world via screens – but is there anything looking back at us? At our home and our everyday life? The art@work exhibition “Durchblicken” explores this look back. Like the windows on the desktop, Tabea Martin wants to stack her canvases and place them on top of each other. She is inspired by screenshots that ti&m employees have taken of their chaotic desktops. Instead of hanging next to each other on the wall, the canvases stand and lie at different angles to each other. The paintings depict scenes from the home office. As usual in her artistic practice, Tabea paints from memory and deals with the everyday. She is interested in the mysterious and inconspicuous. What actually happens in front of these canvases? Sometimes the room is empty, sometimes the faces are huge and unflattering, and sometimes the coffee cup tips over. In her paintings, she draws on the genre of interior painting, which traditionally shows the artist’s view of various scenes in interior spaces. But it is no longer just the painter’s gaze that counts, but the view from another world. She changes the perspective and asks herself how webcams and phone cameras look at our everyday lives. The small everyday studies show moments in front of the screen that are particularly memorable to her. In addition to the scenes from the home office, she has created an overall picture, 2 x 3 meters in size. This picture is a compilation of fragments of the smaller pictures and poses the question of whether these insights into our everyday lives can be combined into something larger. A piece of digital space in which no programs were involved. This assembled space consists only of glimpses into everyday human life and is constructed by the question: What kind of view of our world is this?