NEW YORK, NY.- Sean Kelly announced that the gallery now represents Janaina Tschäpe.
Over the course of her twenty-plus year career, Janaina Tschäpe has been recognized for her arresting body of work that includes painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and drawing. Both cerebral and emotional, Tschäpe’s powerful and atmospheric work in all media possesses a confidence in scale and mastery of material that distinguishes her practice.
Born to a German father and Brazilian mother, Tschäpe has been inspired by 19th-century Romantic painting and the topography of South America. Referencing interests in myth, morphology and the mysteries of aquatic states, she has developed a distinctive language of abstraction in which organic forms are imbued with a remarkable quality of luminosity. Her distinctive compositions convey a sensation of movement, their biomorphic shapes and gestural marks functioning as emotive signifiers of her interior thoughts.
In her carefully nuanced canvases and drawings, imagery evocative of the natural world suggests growth, transition and metamorphosis. Tschäpe’s paintings in particular contain innumerable layers of information accrued through the meticulous application of media including watercolor, casein, colored pencil and pastel. There exists in her work a dynamic tension between the loose, luscious forms that pervade the canvas and the precise systems of markings that often overlay and unify these compositions. Sean Kelly states, “We are delighted that Janaina has joined the gallery. We have admired her work for many years, but recently it has grown exponentially in scale and ambition. She has clearly mastered the technical and aesthetic demands of how to translate the delicacy and precision of her drawings into the challenging scale of her new paintings.”
Janaina Tschäpe was born in Munich, Germany in 1973 and lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at venues including Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Kasama, Japan; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. She has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Whitechapel Gallery, London; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts. Her work can be found in important public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, amongst others. She has completed public commissions in New York City; Miami Beach, Florida; São Paulo, Brazil; and Holbæk, Denmark, and currently has work featured in exhibitions in Augarten, Vienna; Cork, Ireland; Gunma, Japan; and Melbourne, Australia.
