Janaina Tschäpe Between the Sky and the Water. Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, FL December 14, 2020 – May 2, 2021
Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to announce that Janaina Tschäpe’s, Between the Sky and the Water, will open at the Sarasota Art Museum on December 14, the one-year anniversary of the opening of the Museum, and will close on May 2, 2021. This major mid-career exhibition features over 80 works encompassing a wide range of media and will offer an extensive exploration into Tschäpe’s oeuvre over the last twenty years. This exhibition is timed to coincide with Tschäpe’s work on view at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, an exhibition in dialogue with the works of Claude Monet.
Between the Sky and the Water explores the “denkraum” of the artist – the thought-space, psychic space, and studio space in the mind – from which Tschäpe’s paintings emerge. In speaking about her process, Tschäpe states, “all of the explorations – traveling the world with a camera, the performances, the objects evolving into sculptures and then videos and again into installations – everything has led toward my finding the space of painting. Each time I return to painting, it’s with a new level of assuredness about the space that is both contained within, and the space from which the painting emerges.”
All of the works in the exhibition, across a wide variety of media, emerge from Tschäpe’s fascination with landscape. To be a landscape artist is to observe and to understand nature, in a Humboltdian, physiognomic sense – to realize we are in nature, and of nature. Tschäpe’s poetic and powerful re-imaginings of our evolutionary development and shared collective memory connect to the core of our existence—as organisms responding to our environment. Sarasota Art Museum Executive Director, Anne-Marie Russell, the curator of Between the Sky and the Water notes, “While Tschäpe demonstrates an elegant mastery, intellectually and technically, over any media she engages with—photography, video, installation, performance, sculpture, glass— she is, ultimately, a painter.”
Tschäpe’s multifaceted art practice is highly developed and serves to establish an entire cosmology—a Gesamtkunstwerk, the whole studio of the mind—that provides the foundational platform for her painting 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 sensations of movement, their biomorphic shapes and gestural marks functioning as emotive signifiers of her interior imagination.
