Alyssa Collura, Gallery Assistant, has chosen Janaina Tschäpe’s painting, “Carried by the storm”, 2020 for #StaffPicksSaturday.
“My favorite artworks transcend their own imagery. Painted masses attain fluidity. A composition shimmers with kinetic potential.
Janaina Tschäpe masters this in her pulsing canvases. Landscapes become dream fields where nature and mystery intersect.
Carried by the storm, 2020 conjures both earth and sea. Mountainlike crevices shape-shift into waves. Crests and troughs resurface as hills and valleys. Elements seem to perform a dance of chemical change.
Pastel volumes hang like clouds. Swaths of mauve, powder blue, seafoam green and butter yellow are windswept across dark hollows. A vigorous overlay of crayon marks rains down on the surface in a secret language.
After learning about Janaina’s forthcoming exhibition at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, which sets her work in conversation with Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, I reflected on the connection between the two artists. I find the luminous and emotive qualities which exemplify the beauty of Monet’s Impressionism to emerge, in transmuted form, through Janaina.
With their shared subject matter and thrusting motion, I find an art historical reciprocal for Carried by the storm in Monet’s Storm at Belle-Ile, 1886. Complex and romantic, Carried by the storm feels like a contemporary answer to the call of the sublime.” – @alyssa.collura
Janaina Tschäpe, Carried by the storm, 2020, casein and watercolor crayon on canvas, 77 1/8 x 92 1/4 inches