Daniela Finke
Galleri Jules Julian Nikolaj Plads 32, ST 1067 Copenhagen K Danemark
She plays a game of colours and shapes.
Daniela Finke creates her own world of photographic images pointing out obvious and common everyday situations like architectural specialties on the beach, sports competitions or simple leisure.
The abstraction and reduction of form and the intensified colour strengthens the dynamics of the scene. Reduction calls for a new attention.
The TV series BAYWATCH is a legend inside as well as outside the US.
Giving her series the same title, the artist however does not portrait blondes.
Instead she focuses on European life saver competitions, carried out in Warnemünde on the Baltic Sea.
The Berlin photographer has successfully presented series on fast sports before, particularly Polo and Women's soccer.
Again her topic, the life saving sport, is off mainstream.
What Daniela Finke particularly likes to take a look at is competition in its contextual setting with nature, architecture and the audience.
She deconstructs the obvious reality and reduces it to its core.
This allows the discovery of stereotypes and ritual patterns in her compositions. It is always, that form follows function.
Daniela Finke's photos give the illusion to be snapshots, yet, at the same time they seem to be paintings. In the 1960s and 70s trend setting painters achieved photorealistic results by copying the character of blown up photos, including the pixel density, with the brush. Daniela Finke does the exact opposite. Digital processing is the technique she uses on her photographic raw material, creating an "as if painted" effect. Contours are being dissolved, blurs are added and colors are intensified. Both, colors and shapes gain an abstract quality outside the actual object creating their own structure, their own pattern of life.
Finke's pictures - portraits of people in their world of work, sports, and leisure are irritating because they continuously meander between reality and fiction. Blurs obscure physiognomies, but sharpen the focus on movement, gestures, dress, fashion, or the interactions of all elements. Again, what we see is never a representation of reality, but always an autonomous piece of art, made up of digital signs, referring to its naturalistic origin.
For the artist Finke digital processing and alienating effects are merely means to an end. Her actual focus she never loses, and this is always what the photographer sees. Behind the apparent stereotypes moments of being, emotions and individual longing unfold, oftentimes pointed out with humor and irony.
Daniela Finke, born in Hanover, Germany, lives in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited extensively at international art fairs like Art Karlsruhe, Kunst Zürich, Art Vienna, Artfair Scope New York, London, and Miami. Her work is part of numerous public and private collections.
In 2005 she received the prestigious "Europäischen Architekturfotografie-Preis 2005".