Janaina Tschäpe

a sky filled with clouds and the smell of blood oranges

Sean Kelly, New York

September 6 – October 19, 2024

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce a sky filled with clouds and the smell of blood oranges, Janaina Tschäpe’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition marks an exciting evolution in Tschäpe's artistic journey, emphasizing a profound personal exploration, with a focus on the scale and fluidity of mark-making that characterize the artist's vigorous abstractions. Coinciding with the exhibition, a major new monograph on Janaina Tschäpe’s work, featuring an erudite and informative essay by distinguished art historian Joachim Pissarro, is being published by Hatje Cantz and Sean Kelly.

Janaina Tschäpe - a sky filled with clouds and the smell of blood oranges - Exhibitions - Sean Kelly Gallery

Tschäpe’s latest body of work underscores the artist’s fascination with the emotional and poetic potential of art. In this exhibition, she explores the interplay between scale and intimacy, featuring works in oil and oil stick on canvas and works on paper in various scales, including multi-paneled paintings.

"My painting moves within an abstract world. I don't want even the suspicion of an illustration because it is a mere thought that becomes a painting, and at some point, this invented abstract landscape begins to look at you, which is oddly moving, and you continue the dialogue out of which an ethics develops, a kind of respect for this other living being." - Janaina Tschäpe

Tschäpe’s works become sites of intense emotional and intellectual inquiry—the space between passion and reason—where the act of painting is both a meditation on and a resistance to its constraints. The paintings in this exhibition compose an environment in which each work converses with the next, fostering a continuous and evolving narrative. They showcase Tschäpe’s mastery harnessing the fluid dynamics of painting to depict a landscape that is both internal and external, mirroring the complexities of human emotion and perception.

“My paintings are inner landscapes, which are observed, forgotten, brought to light again, filtered through dreams and distant recollections, composed of fragments, reduced to a few elements or supplemented by others, but always abstracted into lines, brush strokes, or surfaces. The painting space is, for me, a real space, a space linked to the moment and which I only invent in the moment of painting.” - Jananina Tschäpe

In the diptych, Lion colored hills, 2024 and triptych, Walking through fields (Passeando no tempo), 2024, each painting functions both independently and as part of a unified narrative. Tschäpe’s artistic expression intertwines the sublime vastness of German landscapes with the vibrant essence of Brazilian culture, blending philosophical tenets from polymath Friedrich Schiller, the inspiring poetry of Octavio Paz, and the concept of observing and celebrating nature advocated by geographer Alexander Von Humbolt.

"I always explore different light conditions simultaneously: light between shadows, in a narrow passage, in a vast, open landscape, or in a landscape hemmed in by trees and rocky outcrops, perhaps even in the dark. Different levels and layers interact and change continually. Everything changes." - Janaina Tschäpe

As Joachim Pissarro states in his essay, “Tschäpe’s canvases serve as arenas wherein the visible intermingles with the visceral, inviting us to traverse conceptual depths through layers of paint and memory that subtly insinuate rather than explicitly reveal.” Her paintings transform nature’s experiences into abstract movements, where air and light become extensions of her gestures. Each piece, rooted in layered memories of landscape, uncovers new connections and energies across the canvas.

"There is something visible about sound. When it vibrates and moves the air, it seems as if I can see how these sounds fill the space and how it changes the space; There are chords that rise to the heights and others that desend to plumb the depths. I often get the impression when painting that I am coordinating an ensemble, as if I were conducting an orchestra."
- Janaina Tschäpe

a sky filled with clouds and the smell of blood oranges highlights the different types of mark-making and media Tschäpe has incorporated throughout her work, spanning bold and dynamic brushwork to fine, drawing-like strokes and expansive, gestural applications of oil paint and oil stick. The exhibition also features her delicate watercolors and pastel works, creating a dialogue between different media and enhancing the interplay amongst her works. Inspired by the evocative, dreamlike qualities of August Strindberg’s landscapes, Tschäpe titled some of the new works with names influenced by the Swedish playwright and painter, such as flowers by the shore (after Strindberg), 2024. Strindberg’s ability to evoke the ethereal and the mystical in his depictions of the natural world resonates deeply with Tschäpe’s vision. Blending elements of lyrical abstraction with themes drawn from the natural world, Tschäpe’s use of color and form creates a visual language that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition, a major new monograph, Janaina Tschäpe, extensively documents Tschäpe’s work over the past seven years, alongside installation images of her museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. This publication documents a prolific period of creativity and boundary-pushing use of media.

Janaina Tschäpe’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Sarasota Art Museum, Florida; the Musée L’Orangerie, Paris, France; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Kasama, Japan; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, and the Contemporary Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO. She has been featured in numerous group exhibitions at venues including NCA Taipei, Taiwan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; TBA21-Augarten, Austria; CCBB, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Centre D’Art Contemporain de Normandie, France; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Ronnebaeksholm, Denmark; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan. Her work is found in important public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, MA; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, amongst others.

For media inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com

For all other inquiries, please email Cecile Panzieri at Cecile@skny.com

Installation Views

Installation Views Thumbnails

Image: Installation view of Janaina Tschäpe: a sky filled with clouds and the smell of blood oranges at Sean Kelly, New York, September 6 – October 19, 2024, Photography: Jason Wyche, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles