Janaina Tschäpe

Taking the female body for her muse, Janaina Tschäpe explores themes of the body and landscape, sex, death, renewal, and transformation in paintings, drawings, photographs, and video installations. To experience Tschäpe's work is to swim through universes of polymorphous landscapes amongst embryonic forms, ambiguous characters, and exotic botanical life. She seeks to give form to the trance of art making, portraying not a dream world, but the sensation of being in one.

Janaina Tschäpe shares her forename with a Brazilian water goddess, and, not coincidentally, her photographs and performances-to-video feature sumptuously organic, watery, distorted female figures,” writes Frieze. Her use of organic lines and ethereal forms in her paintings create a network of relationships, linking the process of artistic practice to lifecycles found in nature.

In Brazil, nature is overwhelming. Everything is growing on top of something else—there is always a plant breaking through a wall or a tree shooting out of the ground. When she returns to the city, she paints with these memories. Her paintings exist in a state of their own becoming. They are systems of palimpsests; each brushstroke, a materially emphatic note, partially occludes a previous mark. In this way, forms are built and colours orchestrated through layers of accumulation.