JANAINA TSCHÄPE

Janaina Tschäpe (1973), a German-Brazilian artist, is not only active as a painter. In addition to the large-size watercolour Tristes Tropiques II, the Mudam possesses a series of photographs from the series After the Rain (2002) as well as a video work called As Camaleoas (2003) featuring women from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Janaina Tschäpe’s initial interest was in issues of identity and femininity, but this later broadened to include studies of physicality, physical presence, origin, evolution, change and death.

Recalling the Indian goddess of rivers and water, whose first name Tschäpe shares, and inspired by the overwhelming lushness of the natural environment in Brazil, the artist produced condensed, narrative moments imbued with an often fairytale-like or mythical atmosphere in many of her works. She frequently portrays figures, whose human appearance takes on threatening or disconcerting shapes as the result of appended, rampant growths. These scenarios, originally created for performance purposes, evolved into meticulously arranged productions that increasingly came to be designed from a painting perspective and were mostly set in the midst of jungle-like backdrops.

As a natural consequence, Tschäpe then returned to her original medium of painting, addressing the theme of rampant nature as well as the medium of painting itself in complex and often large-sized watercolours: “Brazil’s nature is overwhelming. When I go back to the city, I paint with these memories, but, at the same time, I let the paint dictate a lot of what happens. It’s like making stains and letting the stains become forms. I use a lot of dots and little squares, and if I create a pattern, I break it with a brushstroke and then I break the brushstroke again, continually breaking the composition. In a way, it is a response to the cycle of transformation in nature.”

Janaina Tschäpe

www.janainatschape.net