Tschäpe Janaina: Bird that Swallowed Me
Fortes Vilaça presents Bird that swallowed me (Pássaro que me engoliu), Janaina Tschäpe’s sixth exhibition in São Paulo, which will simultaneously occupies the exhibition spaces of the Gallery and the Galpão. The German-Brazilian artist, based in New York for the last 18 years, presents a new body of work that encompasses seven paintings and seven photographs.
The works here presented are imprinted with the distinctive foundations of her research, such as the intense gestural repertoire of her painting process and the recurring sculptural composition of the forms that inhabit her photographs. The result is the emergence of a special mythology that intersperses the presence of fantastical characters with a richly pictorial atmospheric ambience of an inner nature. Tschäpe’s oeuvre forges original narratives as it concertedly evokes formal references of Art History.
The seven photographs presented here make up the series Dormant, created in 2015 during an artistic residency carried out across the seas of Oceania, via TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary 21). They are images of aquatic creatures, analogue to the artist’s practice of creating a surreal female body which emerge time and time again. Here, slender, elongated and ambiguous beings float in the vast liquid element of the ocean. The artist makes reference to the immortal species of jellyfish Turritopsis nutricula that has the remarkable ability to rejuvenate itself, or restore its cells, in times of crisis or danger, alluding to the idea of regeneration and reproduction, by way of repetition of certain sharp-edged shapes and fibrous elements in the constitution of these amphibian bodies. The result is an array of images that operate between the objective and the subjective, between theatricality and nature.
As in her photographs, in her paintings Tschäpe makes use of liquid elements to engage in the free and almost uncontrollable gestural movement, represented here by the fluidity of the paint on the canvas. The evocative titles – Your Ghost in Me, 2016, Treffen Im Wald (Meeting in the Forest), 2016 – reveal that the artist’s visual and affective memory is the primary force that propels the composition of the paintings. With resonances that stem from German Romanticism to Abstract Expressionism, from Fauvism to Modernism, this morphing process unfolds into a surprising compositional maturity and an audacious chromatic variation that the artist commands masterfully. The visceral and passionate expressiveness of the gesture gains substance with a palette of strong, vivid colours, counterbalanced by lighter tones, and by the superposition of rhythmic lines drawn over the brush strokes.
In Fruta (Fruchte Tragen), 2016, the largest painting in the show, Tschäpe employs contrasting hues of red and blue intermingled with lithe, fluid pencil drawings, which at times evoke aquatic plants or foliage. At the same time, the painting that lends its title to the exhibition Pássaro (Der Mich Aufgefressen Hat), 2016, is charged with a frenetic exoticism, yet combined with something natural.
Janaina Tschäpe was born in Munich, Germany. Her solo exhibitions include Quimera at IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art, in 2008; the Triennial of the International Center of Photography, New York andKasama Nichido Museum of Art, Nichido, Japan, both held in 2009. The artist has participated in group shows at MAC USP, São Paulo; MAM, Rio de Janeiro; LiShui Museum of Photography, China; New Museum, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. Her work can be found in several important collections, such as Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Minas Gerais, Brazil; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.
