1. JANAINA TSCHÄPE
Janaina Tschäpe was born on 1973 in Munich, Germany and was raised in São Paulo,
Brazil. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Hochschule fur Bilende Kuenste,
Hamburg and her Master in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New. The artist
lives and works in New York.
WORK
Exploring all kinds of landscapes, Tschäpe’s work is an invitation to an extraordinary
world, a sensual place full of malleable creatures and amorphous beings. Through
various forms of expression, the artist constantly reinvents perceptions of the natural
world, making use of a dynamic combination of photography, drawings, paintings and
sculptures. Together these mediums work to bring the observer into Tschäpe’s watery,
organic universe, one of curiosity, astonishment and wonder.
Water has a big weight on her work; one can observe its contribution and manifestation
throughout most of her medias, its presence found in most of her work. Not only its
fluidity, but also the layered aspects it builds, extensively investigated in her paintings
and drawings, or as the field for sundry creatures and entities performed on her
photographs and videos Water also works to render the sensual feminine world she
embraces: the fertile universe of her fantastic subjective science. Jellyfish, mermaids,
octopi, seahorses… The references are endless, creating a chart of extraordinary
organisms inspired by memories, myths and dreams. Curiously, Tschäpe shares her
name—Janaina—with a Brazilian sea goddess of the Candomblé religion.
The multifaceted structure of Tschäpe’s creative process functions as an attempt to
organize and “categorize” her creatures, invents based on memories, myths and
dreams, opening up a dialogue that subverts our usual perceptions of landscapes and
beings, realigning our vision of the landscape and nature in general. Thriving for an
endlessly prolific universe, Janaina is also somehow measuring time. As she writes, “You
look at something and try to find out where it ends. So the contemplation of a
landscape is always a search, the search of something new, the search of time.”
While in her earlier works Tschäpe often placed herself within the landscape, she now
explores her memories, her inner after-images, conjuring her travels and expeditions to
a deeply-layered remembrance. Whether through her paintings and drawings or
photography and film, Tschäpe reacts to her life experiences in an intense meditative
contemplation of the landscape.