at Sean Kelly TEFAF New York 2025, Stand 330
Janaina Tschape - TEFAF
Janaina Tschäpe
Head-Image
Janaina Tschäpe
Fios sois sobre o ermo (color threads), 2023
oil and oil stick on linen
80 x 60 x 1 inches (203.2 x 152.4 x 2.5 cm)
signed by artist, verso
(JTs-P.23.2984)
Provenance:
The artist with Sean Kelly Gallery New York/Los Angeles.
Exhibition:
Brooklyn Museum, The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, October 4, 2024–January 26, 2025.
Literature:
Pissarro, Joachim. Janaina Tschäpe. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2024. pp. 294, 296-297 (detail).
Janaina Tschäpe
noturno multicor, 2024
watercolor and pastel on paper
paper: 90 x 55 1/4 inches (228.6 x 140.3 cm)
framed: 93 1/2 x 58 5/8 x 2 1/4 inches (237.5 x 148.9 x 5.7 cm)
signed by artist, verso
(JTs-WP.24.3114)
Provenance:
The artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles.
Exhibitions:
Sean Kelly, New York, Janaina Tschäpe: a sky filled with clouds and the smell of blood oranges, September 6–October 19, 2024.
Janaina Tschäpe’s artwork continues her evocative exploration of abstraction rooted in the natural world, offering a lyrical meditation on perception, memory, and transformation. Known for her richly layered compositions that hover between representation and abstraction, Tschäpe creates a space where inner states and external environments converge. Her canvases do not depict nature as it appears, but as it is felt—filtered through memory, emotion, and the sensory experience of time passing.
In this recent work, Tschäpe draws on her longstanding interest in the dynamics of landscape—both terrestrial and aquatic—as metaphors for psychological and emotional states. Atmospheric swells of color and line suggest currents of water, the rustling of leaves, or shifting topographies, yet the imagery remains intentionally elusive. Tschäpe allows forms to emerge and dissolve, capturing nature in flux and emphasizing its cycles of growth, metamorphosis, and renewal. The result is a canvas that pulses with energy and movement, while maintaining a sense of contemplative stillness.
Her process is deeply physical, involving sweeping gestures, layered washes, and intricate details that reflect the artist’s intuitive engagement with the material. Yet within this physicality lies a quiet restraint, a sensitivity to nuance that invites slow looking and prolonged reflection. The painting becomes a site of both emotional intensity and intellectual inquiry—what Tschäpe refers to as “the space between passion and reason.” Here, abstraction functions not as a retreat from the world, but as a method for decoding its complexities.
“Tschäpe’s canvases serve as arenas wherein the visible intermingles with the visceral, inviting us to traverse conceptual depths through layers of paint and memory that subtly insinuate rather than explicitly reveal.”
- Joachim Pissarro in his essay for Janaina Tschäpe (published 2024 by Hatje Cantz and Sean Kelly, 2024)
Janaina Tschäpe is a German-Brazilian artist whose multidisciplinary body of work has encompassed painting, drawing, photography, video, and sculpture. Initially studying as a painter, Tschäpe turned her attention to sculpture, photography and performance after graduating from Hamburg’s Hochschule für Bilende Künste. Her photography and performance often involve the artist, or other bodies, interacting with or depict the coastal and riparian landscapes of Brazil. In her paintings, Tschäpe takes inspiration from her memories of these spaces to create her large-scale abstract paintings.
Tschäpe’s dreamlike, abstract landscapes blur the line between aquatic, plant, and human forms, referencing not only the landscapes Tschäpe draws upon for inspiration, but also her interest in myth, morphology, and the mysteries of aquatic states. There is a dynamic interplay, too, between the liquidity of the casein, watercolor, and oil from which Tschäpe builds up her surfaces, and the precise systems of marking in colored pencil, pastel, and oil which are layered atop them. Tschäpe’s paintings develop a distinctive language of abstraction in which organic motifs are imbued with a remarkable luminosity.
Installation view of Janaina Tschäpe Soy mi propio paisaje at the CAC Málaga, Spain, September 22 - December 3, 2023.
Tschäpe holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York and a BFA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, Germany. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Sarasota Art Museum, Florida; the Musée L’Orangerie, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona; the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Kasama, Japan; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, and the Contemporary Museum of Art, St Louis.
Tschäpe’s work has also 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; Centre D’Art Contemporain de Normandie, France; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanazawa, Japan; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Pratt Manhattan Gallery; OCA Museu da Cidade, São Paulo; Kunsthal Kade, Netherlands; Cidade Matarazzo, São Paulo, Brazil; Ronnebaeksholm, Denmark; Cultural Centro Banco do Brazil in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan.
Tschäpe’s work is 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, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others. She has completed public commissions in New York City; Miami Beach, Florida; São Paulo, Brazil; and Holbæk, Denmark.
Tschäpe currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.