German-Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe has a multidisciplinary practice which spans painting, drawing, photography, performance, video art, sculpture, murals and installations. Drawing from the natural world, Tschäpe presents dreamlike abstract landscapes inspired by memory and myth. Balancing fluidity with precision, her work is imbued with a universality that reflects the various topographies she has travelled through or calls home, from Germany, Brazil and America to beyond.
Over the last decade, Tschäpe has dedicated her practice almost exclusively to painting and drawing. In her compositions, colours bleed and pool into one another, as if in a state of osmosis. Rendered with mixed-media, including oil paint, watercolour, casein and crayon, organic forms seem to ebb and flow with the movement of water. ‘Underwater has always been very fascinating for me,’ the artist notes. ‘The way you lose dimensions a little bit: your body underwater becomes a different shape, it elongates, it loses perspective, it gets light.’ These biomorphic shapes can be traced back to the artist’s earlier body of surreal photographs, videos and performance pieces, which situated the body in relationship to coastal landscapes. Traversing wonder, melancholy, mystery and joy, Tschäpe’s sprawling networks of colour and form abound with emotional resonance.
‘Inspired by the natural world and conjured from her memories of specific locations, Tschäpe’s vigorous abstractions envelop the viewer. Their commanding presence and sumptuous palette draw one deeper into the thicket of loose, decisively orchestrated gestures that comprise her work. Each of Tschäpe’s paintings serves as a field for reflection and introspection, an alchemic laboratory of sorts – perhaps an explorer’s ship at sea – that allows the artist to transform her environmental awareness and emotional psyche into a vision of unchartered territory, the resulting work a map previously undrawn, a land hitherto unseen.’
S. Kelly and J. Grove, ‘Introduction’, in Janaina Tschäpe, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2024, p. 6
