![]() “For me, it was a way of creating a universe around me, in a dialogue with my surroundings,” Tschäpe explained. Her figure occasionally looks like a dead body, but more often, like someone who had opted out for a moment and disappeared into herself. In 1997, she began her series “100 Little Deaths”-photographs of herself lying prone, face down, on park paths, fields, and rocky shores. For a while, she turned away from painting altogether. Immersing herself in the work of female performance artists like Marina Abramović, Rebecca Horn, Ana Mendieta, and Hannah Wilke gave her other models. “Painting at that time was just so loaded with emotions and history that I would get to that place very fast, and it created an anxiety.” “When you think of all the painters in Germany in the ’90s, it’s hard to find a female name,” recalled Tschäpe, who found herself getting stuck in the studio. It was a fraught time for young female painters in a country where the giants who had established themselves in the previous decade- Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, and Martin Kippenberger-still reigned. Tschäpe, who has painted since childhood, grew up primarily in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but returned to Germany and attended art school in Hamburg in the 1990s. ![]() The artist’s name, Janaina, means “mother of fish” and reminded her mother of her homeland’s ocean shores. Tschäpe was born in Munich in 1973 to a German father and a Brazilian mother who longed to return to Brazil. “With paintings, every time you put yourself into a more challenging place, you’re opening up more doors to create new dialogues.” “I see it rather as an opening, because you obviously can create more layers,” she said, acknowledging the freedom that comes with oil’s slow-to-dry lushness. This time, she limited herself to oil paint and oil stick, though she does not consider it a constraint. These newest paintings represent a shift: For years, Tschäpe has worked with a larger range of media-watercolor, crayon, and colored pencil-that resulted in many smaller, drawing-like marks, even on her largest canvases. For instance, in Irrlicht (Will-ó-the-wisp), thick, burnt red, vertical lines travel from left to right and back again, drawing the eye across a dense marsh-like terrain of blue and green hues. ![]() “For me, all these paintings are an accumulation almost of a language that you acquire over years, an understanding with the canvas.” The language in this body of work is defined by bold, expansive marks and gestures. There is the other one coming,” she said. “Whenever I work on a body of work, obviously one painting is never done. The title of the show, “ Restless Moraine,” conjures the specter of landscape that nearly always hangs over Tschäpe’s work, and also refers to the restive energy that courses through her paintings. On view through March 4th, the solo exhibition consists of seven large paintings, all completed in 2022 and made in conversation with one another-the momentum from one painting carries over to the next. “I mostly try not to stop until I’m almost done,” she said, “until the painting can breathe again.” The New York–based artist made her Los Angeles debut last month at Sean Kelly Gallery’s West Coast outpost. Janaina Tschäpe prefers to paint in long, uninterrupted stretches, focusing on just one painting at a time.
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