Come In is Tatjana Doll’s third exhibition at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art. The twelve paintings presented here provide insight into the current state of her artistic project.

As is the case with DOLL’s oeuvre as a whole, each of the works in this exhibition is a secondary image. Yet they are not secondary in relation to the corporeal world of “reality”; rather, they are secondary in relation to other, already existing images — on the one hand, depictions of real objects (in this exhibition, cars), and on the other, sign-like images such as pictograms and postage stamps, or figurative images such as museum art and comics. The painter Marlene Dumas has remarked that “The worldis flat,” succinctly capturing the image-reality with which contemporary artists are confronted. In the world rendered as image, everything is available, everything comparable with everything else.

Thus, DOLL’s sources range from the personal to the public, connecting high and low, shifting between the sphere of banal necessity and that of luxury, until distinctions themselves begin to dissolve. Through painting after existing images, the established “order of things” forfeits its binding force; categorical separations lose their sharpness.DOLL’s painting does not seek to understand the given images; it withholds from them the indicators of a subjective stance and pushes itself off from them. At the beginning of her career, DOLL painted space-defying formats using ordinary industrial enamel. The impression could arise that what was at stake was the direct transfer of an object onto canvas in a 1:1 ratio — as if the painter functioned as an unconscious, high-energy machine for the production of coloured reproductions. Accordingly, the use of enamel laid claim to the rawness of a technical coating for painterly constructions that leave no room for intimacy, imagination, or intuition. Whatever deviation then emerged in the reproductive image, whatever appeared extraordinary or irregular, resulted from seemingly uncontrolled painterly events. For example, a seemingly unprofessional, heavily applied enamel layer, as if handled unprofessionally, might form bubbles that burst and run, disrupting the representation once the painting, executed on the floor, was set upright.

From 2019 onwards, however, DOLL has not opened another can of enamel, turning instead to conventional artists’ paint — oil. With few exceptions, the works in Come In are oil paintings (DOLL has used gouache or acrylic only occasionally) — and they are connected to the earlier enamel works by way of a rupture. Oil paint is not suited to covering large surfaces on an industrial scale, and relinquishing control over it is not as readily achieved as with enamel. On the contrary, oil corresponds to measured handling and subtle differentiation. Thus, in DOLL’s more recent works, the challenge lies in translating chance, failure, and momentary effects into intentional procedure, in order to render visible the improbable and the marginal, the shattering of control and the return of the repressed.

The exhibition includes Portrait of a Lady after a work by the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden (1399–1464), a rendition of the chained monkeys by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569), a scene featuring the two protagonists from the animated television series Pinky and the Brain (1995–1998), two paintings with protagonists from the Chinese animated film Nezha 2 (2025), as well as an appropriation of the Mona Lisa (1503–1506). One might say that these figures form the cast of a theatre play whose writing would exceed the capacities of any author and for which only a single title suggests itself: “What is the human being?” — the fundamental philosophical question posed by Immanuel Kant. As if as a result of being overwhelmed by such an unnamed undertaking, the more or less familiar source images are painted as though subject to interference in the reproductive transfer from one image to another (rather like the distortions that once afflicted television broadcasts). The figurative constellations of an ultimate drama function as a matrix for specific beauty marked by latent indiscipline, transience, excessive detail, chromatic monotony, the violent collision of pictorial elements of incompatible value, painterly elusiveness — a painting emerges that is difficult to describe, for it approaches the collapse of what is conventionally known as painterly organisation. It occupies a place outside the opposition of abstraction and figuration, less pursued than permitted (as if this painting offered its central subject, the painter, an opportunity to vacate her post).

The painter paints herself out of the picture when she twice produces a canvas after a work by Roy Lichtenstein, in which the face of a soldier looking (into the gallery space) is linked to a speech bubble placing these words in his mouth: “I can see the whole room ... and there’s nobody in it!”. Not being visible grants the painter licence to occupy most of the two canvases with fleeting markings — minute-painting, swiped brushstrokes that are unbound, mobile and animating, yet elude the standards of “quality.” In the case of the wrecked emergency vehicle (CAR_§20RDG), an accident — an irruption into organised life — becomes the occasion for the sheen of contaminated primary colours (the colours of Piet Mondrian), appearing in chromatic inflections such as silver, neon red, reddish violet, bluish violet, or reddish black. Finally, the pictogram PICT_X provides a universal image of what DOLL’s deregulated painting is: a transgression, sanctioned by the authority of the picture plane (the fetish of Modernism) through the sign of an X. For that is how it is: the deregulation of painting is not trivial; it comes at a price. Hence, the final word is “Polizei” (Police).

Ulrich Loock

March 2026