HASTINGS.- Hastings Contemporary is presenting Janaina Tschäpe: Conversations with the sea, the first major solo exhibition in a UK gallery by the leading German-Brazilian artist. The exhibition opened on June 13 and remains on view through September 13, 2026.

Filling Hastings Contemporary’s largest gallery space, the exhibition features a dramatic new series of paintings and works on paper created by Tschäpe in direct response to the English coast. The works were inspired by the artist’s visit to Hastings during a wet and stormy winter in 2025, when the force and atmosphere of the sea became the starting point for a new body of work. The exhibition also includes a film piece.



For Tschäpe, the sea is not simply a subject to be represented. It is a living force — restless, rhythmic and impossible to fix. Her paintings approach water as movement: something that folds, accelerates, disperses and returns. Rather than describing the ocean literally, the works suggest its psychological and physical presence, turning the gallery into a space of tides, currents, memory and atmosphere.

“The sea has always carried projection: solitude, longing, disappearance and myth,” Tschäpe has said. In these new works, that sense of projection becomes a visual field in which form dissolves and reappears. Memory, like the tide, is never still.





Born in Munich in 1973 and shaped by formative years spent in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Tschäpe has long been drawn to the sea as a threshold between real and imagined worlds. Her first name refers to the Brazilian sea goddess of the Candomblé religion, and water has remained a powerful presence in a practice that moves across painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture and performance.

The new large-scale paintings at Hastings Contemporary are expansive, semi-abstract landscapes in which sea and sky meet in dense bands of color and movement. Working with oil, oil stick and watercolor, Tschäpe builds surfaces that feel at once atmospheric and bodily. Lines gather, drift and dissolve; diluted pigments behave like sediment; bands of zinc white evoke the salt air above the water.

One of the key works in the exhibition, Meeresatem (Breathing the shore) from 2025, measures more than four meters wide. Reproduced in the press material, the painting is a sweeping field of blue, white and violet, its surface filled with restless marks that evoke both the turbulence of the sea and the inner movement of thought.

Tschäpe’s watercolors extend this dialogue with movement on a more intimate scale. In them, drawing and gesture behave like currents. Lines attempt to hold structure, while brushstrokes interrupt and redirect them. The works remain deliberately unresolved, held in tension like tides meeting one another.

Throughout the exhibition, Tschäpe’s work sits between abstraction and representation. Her forms are not fixed, yet they carry traces of landscape, body, memory and myth. By blending lyrical abstraction with environmental themes, she creates a language that feels both contemporary and ancient, personal and elemental.

Kathleen Soriano, Director of Hastings Contemporary, said that Tschäpe brings “the swell of the English Channel and the immensity of the world’s oceans” into the heart of the gallery, filling the Foreshore Gallery with color, light and dynamic movement.

The exhibition forms part of Hastings Contemporary’s summer season and is shown alongside exhibitions by Miguel Rothschild and Moore / Freud. For visitors arriving from the beach, the program offers contrasting visions of the sea, from Tschäpe’s atmospheric, psychologically charged works to Rothschild’s dramatic seascapes.

Tschäpe received her BFA from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She lives and works in New York.

Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at institutions including CAC Málaga; Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Contemporary Museum of Art, St. Louis; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; and Sarasota Art Museum.

Tschäpe has also participated in group exhibitions at major international institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Whitechapel Gallery in London, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa.

Her work is held in important public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Harvard Art Museums; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum.

Located on Rock-a-Nore Road in Hastings Old Town, Hastings Contemporary is an independent arts charity housed in an award-winning building on the town’s historic fishing beach. With a program shaped by marine ecology, ocean futures and sustainable cultures, the gallery brings together artists, scientists, fishing communities and the public to explore the sea as both environment and imagination.

In Conversations with the sea, Tschäpe transforms the experience of the coast into a meditation on movement, memory and the unseen forces that shape both landscape and inner life.