NATURA MORTE
Digital Still Lifes by Winkhaus
In the series Natura Morte, Tina Winkhaus translates the classical still life into the digital age. The works are digitally composed photographs that formally and conceptually reference the visual tradition of the Old Masters—while simultaneously reworking it in a radical, contemporary way.
As in the works of Caravaggio, Zurbarán, or the Dutch vanitas painters of the 17th century, the motifs exist between beauty and transience, between precise observation and metaphysical charge. Animals, fruits, plants, and architectural fragments emerge in dramatic light, modeled out of deep darkness. The light is not illustrative but existential: it highlights, isolates, dissects—and recalls the moral rigor of Baroque painting.
Unlike in classical natura morta, the animals depicted by Winkhaus are not merely symbolic. Parrot, pelican, and other creatures appear present, almost psychologically charged. They seem to linger, to observe, to suffer, or to withdraw into themselves. Nature is not decorative here, but autonomous—at once beautiful, vulnerable, and unsettling.
Formally, Winkhaus works with a digital multilayeredness that recalls the painterly construction of Jan Davidsz. de Heem or the theatrical spatial staging of Rembrandt. Individual photographic fragments are precisely composed, condensed, and fused into a new reality. Digital technique does not replace painting; it assumes its tasks: the orchestration of light, the structuring of depth, materiality, and iconography.
The series also addresses the relationship between control and loss in the digital age. While Baroque vanitas understood death as part of a divine order, Natura Morte negotiates a contemporary uncertainty: nature as something threatened, fragmented, artificially preserved. Beauty becomes the final form of resistance.
Natura Morte is not a nostalgic return, but a conscious continuation of art history. The works stand in line with the great European still-life tradition—while simultaneously articulating a new, digital Baroque aesthetic for the 21st century.