Xippas Arte Contemporáneo is very pleased to announce Janaina Tschäpe´s first solo exhibition in Montevideo. For her first visit in Uruguay, the german brazilian artist presents a selection of 16 recent works, including watercolor, fotography, video and sculpture.
Fern Weh, Janaina Tschäpe very last video produced at the Galápagos’ islands, commissioned by Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, has been inspiring her recent works and consequently named the present exhibition.
…Fern Weh surrounds the idea of an island and how our imagination interprets our perception of an island. The design of an island promotes the feeling of isolation, an urgency to escape and the desire to explore…
Taking the female body for her muse, Janaina Tschäpe explores themes of the body and landscape, sex, death, renewal and transformation in paintings, drawings, photographs and video installations. To experience Tschäpe’s work is to swim through universes of polymorphous landscapes amongst embryonic forms, ambiguous characters and exotic botanical life. She seeks to give form to the trance of art making, portraying not a dream world, but the sensation of being in one.
Her use of organic lines and ethereal forms in her paintings create a network of relationships, linking the process of artistic practice to lifecycles found in nature. In Brazil, nature is overwhelming. Everything is growing on top of something else – there is always a plant breaking through a wall or a tree shooting out of the ground. When she returns to the city, she paints with these memories. Her paintings exist in a state of their own becoming. They are systems of palimpsests; each brushstroke, a materially emphatic note, partially occludes a previous mark. In this way, forms are built and colors orchestrated through layers of accumulation. Their physically sensuous surfaces give way to topologies of finely calibrated hues. They create the sensation of being under water or wrapped up in diaphanous cloaks.
