JANAINA TSCHÄPE

Born in Munich, Germany and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Janaina Tschäpe received a Master’s in Fine Arts studies from the Hochschule fur Bilende Kuenste, Hamburg, Germany and an MA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, the city she has called home for over twenty years. Tschäpe has become recognised for a multivalent body of work, embracing film, photography, sculpture and performance, as well as painting and drawing. It is the latter discipline which serves as the core element in Tschäpe’s practice and connective tissue relating all of her work. Over time, Tschäpe has developed a distinctive language of abstraction in which organic forms, evocative of the natural world, suggest growth, transition and metamorphosis. It is her distinct use of colour, and the allusion to landscape and memory, present throughout her work, that forms both the inspiration and imagery for these new works.

Tschäpe explains that her compositions always begin with a colour, ‘an idea of colour developing into a landscape,’ which is laid down on the canvas in casein, a water-soluble paint derived from milk proteins. The drawing that follows is imposed in watercolour pencil on the surface of the more ‘traditional landscape’ becoming, in her words, more like ‘cartography,’ a system of mark-making that she likens to ‘telling the story of that day.’ In MorningGreen the viewer is drawn in with sweeping brushstrokes of greens, blues, and yellows, that evoke the sensation of movement in the wind or underwater. The detailed lines that overlay the composition underscores this, their biomorphic shapes and gestural marks functioning as emotive signifiers of the artist’s interior thoughts.

In Kleine Nachtmusik, she teases a semblance of the night sky with two stars punctuating an alternately navy, light blue and white field; in the foreground passages of green and white flow across the canvas, creating depth of field and the illusion of land and sky. All of the works in this exhibition reveal how Tschäpe has clearly mastered the technical and aesthetic demands of translating the delicacy and precision of her drawing practice into the challenging scale of her new paintings. As she describes it, ‘the drawing is a constant compositional element; it is very controlled [and] precise. The gesture may be light, a caress versus a more aggressive punctuation, [but] it becomes a bit like language: an alphabet of different marks of different length.’

Janaina Tschäpe has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Kasama, Japan; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland and the Contemporary Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri. She has been featured in numerous international group exhibitions at venues including Whitechapel Gallery, London; the TBA21 Augarten, Vienna, Austria; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil; Centre D’Arte Contemporain de Normandie, France; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Kunsthal KAde, Amersfoort, The Netherlands; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan to name a few. Her work is included in important international public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janerio, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY amongst others.