The world of NFT (Non-Fungible Token) art awaits you. Thanks to artist Petra Kaltenbach, 60, who is redefining Dubai’s art scene, augmented reality (AR) is revolutionising paintings.
With two decades of experience leading an advertising business back home, the award-winning artist and curator from Germany relocated to Dubai in 2004 with competence in graphic design and video art.
Petra was nominated for the International Emerging Artist Award — IEAA — in 2016. Her video art was accepted to be displayed on the Burj Khalifa’s façade in 2018. She was named the best UAE-resident artist at World Art Dubai the following year. She was also sponsored by Canon, which provided her with a one-year stipend in exchange for her work with their UV printing technology. Kaltenbach has been a member of the curatorial team of World Art Dubai, one of the most important art shows in the Middle East, since 2019.
“That was the start of this city’s transformation period. In an exclusive interview, Kaltenbach remarked, “This transition from the old to the new inspired me for my fundamental topic “transformation.”
It has a magical quality to it. What you see in front of you is a tangible version of a painting, but a video shows the painting morph into many artistic aspects — a splash of colours, moving objects, animation, and graphics — when seen through an app on your mobile phone.
What’s more, unlike a QR Code, which takes you to a webpage to show you what’s embedded in the code, you can see both the static artwork and the motion video at the same time.