Janaina Tschäpe brings the swell of the English Channel and the immensity of the world’s oceans into the heart of Hastings Contemporary.
We are excited to present the first major solo exhibition in a UK gallery of work by the leading German-Brazilian artist, Janaina Tschäpe.
Filling our largest gallery space, the exhibition features a dramatic new series of paintings and works on paper created by Tschäpe in response to her experience of visiting a wet and stormy Hastings in the winter of 2025. The works will be complemented by a film piece.
Spending her formative years in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Tschäpe, whose first name references a Brazilian sea goddess, has always been captivated by the notion of the sea as a gateway to mystical realms.
Speaking about the making of the show, Tschäpe explains: “For this exhibition by the sea, I have been thinking about water not as image, but as force – as movement that folds, accelerates, disperses, and returns. Water organises space through rhythm rather than contour. It resists fixation.”
Her resulting large-scale, semi-abstract landscapes are made up of extraordinary tapestries of forms and lines, where drawing and gesture move like currents.
Tschäpe’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at major museums internationally, including the Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Denmark; the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Japan; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland; and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, United States.