Janaina Tschäpe
Janaina Tschäpe was born in Munich, Germany, in 1973. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Over her career spanning more than twenty years, Tschäpe's multidisciplinary body of work has encompassed painting, drawing, photography, video, and sculpture.
In her practice, Tschäpe often incorporates themes related to aquatic, plant, and human life to suggest dreamlike and abstract landscapes that blur the lines between illusion and reality. Drawing on her interest 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 characteristic compositions convey a sense of movement, their biomorphic forms and graphic gestures functioning as emotional signifiers of her inner thoughts.
Her meticulously nuanced canvases and drawings include images evoking the natural world and suggesting growth, transition, and metamorphosis. Tschäpe's paintings, in particular, contain countless layers of information accumulated through the careful application of various media, including watercolor, casein, colored pencil, and pastel. A dynamic tension exists in her work between the loose, luxuriant forms that fill the canvas and the precise systems of marks that often overlay and unify these compositions.
Janaina Tschäpe lives and works in New York City. Her works are held in major public collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain; the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden; the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, among others. She has completed public commissions in New York City, Miami Beach, Florida; São Paulo, Brazil; and Holbæk, Denmark.
