Bio

Janaina Tschäpe was born in Munich, Germany in 1973. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg and her Master in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Throughout her twenty-plus year career Tschäpe’s multidisciplinary body of work has encompassed painting, drawing, photography, video and sculpture.

In her practice, Tschäpe often incorporates themes of aquatic, plant and human life to suggest dreamlike, abstract landscapes that blur perceptions of illusion and reality. Referencing interests 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 distinctive compositions convey a sensation of movement, their biomorphic shapes and gestural marks functioning as emotive signifiers of her interior thoughts.

Her carefully nuanced canvases and drawings include imagery evocative of the natural world suggesting growth, transition and metamorphosis. Tschäpe’s paintings in particular contain innumerable layers of information accrued through the meticulous application of media including watercolor, casein, colored pencil and pastel. There exists in her work a dynamic tension between the loose, luscious forms that pervade the canvas and the precise systems of markings that often overlay and unify these compositions.

Janaina Tschäpe lives and works in New York. Her work can be found in important public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. She has completed public commissions in New York City; Miami Beach, Florida; São Paulo, Brazil; and Holbæk, Denmark.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Musée de l’Orangerie in dialogue with Claude Monet, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Kasama, Japan; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, and the Contemporary Museum of Art, St Louis. She has been featured in numerous group exhibitions at venues including The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland; NCA Taipei, Taiwan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; TBA21- Augarten, Vienna, Austria; CCBB, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2017); Centre D’Art Contemporain de Normandie, France; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanazawa, Japan; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2016); Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Pratt Manhattan Gallery (2015); OCA Museu da Cidade, São Paulo; Kunsthal Kade, Netherlands; Cidade Matarazzo, São Paulo, Brazil; Ronnebaeksholm, Denmark (2014); Cultural Centro Banco do Brasil in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (2013).