JANAINA TSCHÄPE

Octavio Paz, 1987Galerie Max Hetzler, London, is pleased to present the sky beneath my skin, a solo exhibition by Janaina Tschäpe. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery, and her first in the London space.

For the exhibition, Tschäpe brings together a new body of large-scale paintings and ‘Self Portrait’ works on paper, alongside a video piece from 2000. Conveying a deep engagement between the landscape and the body, the artist’s works explore the porous boundaries between the self and the natural world. Tschäpe’s monumental painting Meeresatem (Breathing the shore), 2025, created for her recent institutional solo exhibition at Hastings Contemporary in summer 2026, marks a conceptual starting point. In this work, figurative elements seem to emerge and recede across the canvas, offering a site of convergence in which the movement of the ocean meets the expressive potential of gesture. Here, longing becomes entangled with haptic brushstrokes and liquid pools of paint. Drawing the viewer into her dreamlike abstract landscapes, Tschäpe evokes a dialogue throughout the exhibition between the self and nature, at once inseparable and distinct.

In Tschäpe’s work, a brushstroke is not simply descriptive, it is an action: a continuous movement between construction and disruption, precision and instinct. Resisting representation, her abstract compositions foreground tangible acts of mark-making – colour, pressure, erasure, layering, interruption – to convey intangible states of being, such as emotion, memory and selfhood. In O mar te estrela (stardust), 2026, the sea, the sky and the soul come together in a symphony of blue, met with accents of vibrant orange. Densely layered, the canvas seems to shift between foreground and background, surface and depth, each brushmark and gesture visible, yet part of a wider whole. Referenced directly in the title of Reclining Nude, 2026, the body is insinuated as a metaphysical presence through strata of looping forms in earthy, natural tones. Rendered in tactile layers, browns and blues are punctuated with burnt orange, soft pink and chalky white. In Self, 2026, the senses are awakened with a chord of vibrant pink. Imbued with a sense of urgency, the central mass of colour seems to thrum with a kinetic force. On this, the artist explains: ‘The viewer is not asked to stand outside the landscape, but to experience the painting as a place of movement – a terrain in which looking becomes a form of searching.’

Composed in pastel and watercolour on paper, Tschäpe’s new cycle of ‘Self Portraits’, 2026, belongs to a series initiated in 2018. The works are driven by a renewed urge to look inwards, to consider what the artist describes as ‘the strange silence of looking at oneself’. In this shifting, unstable process, selfhood becomes not a literal representation, but rather a manifestation of the interior terrain. Built from an accumulation of painterly gestures and free flowing forms, the compositions offer an unveiling of the self, unfiltered and raw. In this way, Tschäpe presents a search for nature’s force within the self, without turning nature into metaphor alone. The body becomes an extension of this same field. Hinted at throughout the exhibition, its presence is made palpable in the artist’s early video work, Moss, 2000_._ Screened in silence on an intimate scale, the looped video depicts the artist moving through a body of water. Submerged beneath its pooled and rippling surface, Tschäpe enacts an exchange between the internal and external world, between landscape and self, between sky and skin.

Janaina Tschäpe (b. 1973, Munich, Germany) lives and works in New York. Tschäpe’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Hastings Contemporary; Aître Saint-Maclou, Rouen (both 2026); Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre (2023–2024); CAC Málaga (2023); Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2021); Sarasota Art Museum, Florida; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (both 2020–2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona (2014); Louis Vuitton Aventura Mall, Miami (2013); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2008); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2006); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004–2005), among others.

Tschäpe’s work is in the collections of institutions including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collection Lambert, Avignon; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Mudam Luxembourg; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; S.M.A.K. – Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo; TBA21 – Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; and University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, among others.

Janaina Tschäpe will be in conversation with Enrique Juncosa at Galerie Max Hetzler, London, on Wednesday, 25 November, at 6.30pm. Please RSVP at rsvp@maxhetzler.com_. ___

1 O. Paz, ‘La casa de la mirada’ __(The House of Glances), in Árbol adentro (A Tree Within), 1987

For inquiries please contact Borbala Komjathy: borbala@maxhetzler.com