Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to announce Janaina Tschäpe’s solo exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie, the museum’s fifth “Contemporary counterpoint” to Claude Monet’s Les Nymphéas (waterlilies). Contemporary counterpoint is a program, initiated in 2018, in which the museum invites contemporary artists to create an exhibition in response to the work of renowned painter, Claude Monet.
Janaina Tschäpe’s concept for her exhibition resonates with Monet’s declaration: “My only desire is a more intimate fusion with nature, and the only fate I wish for is, in accordance with Goethe’s precepts, to have worked and lived in harmony with its laws.” Tschäpe’s work – encompassing video, drawing, performance, and painting – takes its inspiration from contemplating nature, its elusiveness, and its metamorphoses. Tschäpe states, “To me, painting means feeling something right up close, being physically in the present with body and soul. I could never explain to anyone this intimate dialogue with the canvas. My painting doesn’t come from pictures. It arises out of my observations, which can be observations of nature but just as well observations from fantasy.”
For her exhibition, Tschäpe produced a new painting titled The Sea, and a series of four drawings which draw inspiration from the notebooks Monet filled with quickly sketched observations of his pond at Giverny. Tschäpe interprets this work as a mind-body dialogue: “That comes more from my need to stay a bit longer with my canvas when the major work has been done. I often have an urge to still fondle my canvas for a while, for example, with the pencil, to flit over the colored skin like a caress.” Also featured in the exhibition is Tschäpe’s mesmerizing dreamlike video, Blood, sea, which immerses the viewer in a colorful organic world, imbued with influences from her Brazilian heritage.
