The artist Britta Thie is known for her works at the intersection of painting, film and digital media, in which she addresses the aesthetics and mechanisms of our mediatised world. From 7 March to 4 May 2025, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg will be presenting Thie's hyperrealistic paintings for the first time as an installation-based solo show entitled Studio.
For Studio, Britta Thie draws on the visual worlds of the film industry and transposes them into the exhibition space. A real film set becomes the exhibition setting and the technical equipment in the paintings - camera cars, spotlights and other devices - become the main characters. Their hyperrealistic depiction opens up a theatrical dimension that seems to tell of life before, during and after filming. With Studio, Britta Thie refers to so-called ‘prop graveyards’, in which entire film sets and their narratives, detached from time and space, wait to be revived for another season.
Based on photographs and drawings that Thie made on film sets, the paintings of equipment and devices that are otherwise behind the camera take centre stage. The expansion of the narrative, which also includes the technology behind the scenes, already played an important role in Thie's earlier works. With Studio, the artist takes this to the extreme: all the world's a stage, and even the setting is a player. Paintings and film set meet in the room: they re-enact the dramas in front of and behind the camera, while their remote placement deliberately disturbs the original narrative of the backdrop. They not only tell of the technology itself, but also of the invisible work and the shadows of production behind the fiction, which otherwise only become visible with the end credits.
The relocation of these objects to the offline sphere and their representation through one of the oldest of all artistic media, painting, represents a central aspect of Thies' artistic practice. It is the tensions of the present that her pictures negotiate: the interplay of analogue and digital, reality and staging, fixity and impermanence.