Christoph Florin merges analogue and digital worlds through window views in browser windows

Christoph and Florin Schmidt are a Hamburg-based artist duo who have been working together since 2009, although technically, they have been working together a bit longer “if you count building things with Lego and doing children’s drawings together,” says Florin. After finding common ground in their painting styles, the pair decided to officially come together under one artist name in 2011, merging their art school backgrounds with years of street art experience.

Their recent series of browser window paintings: Window Views, started out in pandemic lockdowns — a time when “our screens had become a window to the world” and we watched vacant streets outside our own. “Trapped between four walls, we had the privilege of reflecting and introversion, but also soaking up a lot of information,” Christoph says. “We were able to watch content from people that could show us different perspectives, for example by highlighting issues of marginalised communities.”

From their extended stays in the digital world at the time, the pair played with the idea of expanding on these opened browser windows by visually exploring them as “seemingly real windows, allowing one to look out onto vast horizons (perhaps with hope and longing),” through painting. In a period where everything felt quite contained, Window Views was a series of surreal scenes still lifes that hoped to “observe the little things happening on the window sills”, highlighting objects that in some way “may display or allude to certain topics like isolation, loneliness, social, systemic or environmental issues, gender roles, identity, addictions, temptations and so on,” explains Florin.

For their distinctively hyperreal, abstract, early internet style, Christoph and Florin turn to pop culture from decades past — “especially the 80s and 90s when everything seemed so exciting, at least to us as kids,” says Florin. For Window Views, the pair worked with everyday domestic objects to imagine them anew, taking window cleaner, high heels and Bioletti’s and transforming them into their smooth graphic forms to sit on the ledges of their blocky Microsoft browser frames.

These playgrounds of shape always start out as pencil sketches. Before Christoph and Florin start the painting process, the pair undertake a complex and delicate process of masking and blocking out forms with vinyl before they coat their canvases using spray guns, acrylic paint and fine airbrushes. Each piece is completed entirely collaboratively, from preparation to execution, with surprisingly, no sibling feuds.

“The years we spent painting on the street probably made it necessary for the pieces to immediately grab the viewer’s attention and create a mood that appeals to many people,” says Christoph. Other than creating works for people to simply “enjoy the aesthetic and the atmosphere of our art”, he adds, the pair hope that gazing out into their browser window views offers a space for reflection on our increasingly digitised world, somewhere to ponder the “evolving nature of connection”.