Janaina Tschäpe

Janaina Tschäpe creates dreamlike, fantastical environments in large-scale painting, multimedia works, and installation. Tschäpe privileges organic forms and personal experience in her artistic practice, using her own body as a foil for the mythologies and forms she creates. In the diaristic series 100 Little Deaths (1996-2002), she explored her body’s response to travel as she moved around various countries and continents. Tschäpe would document herself in new places, conflating the representation of her body with the external landscape. She stated: “the space was very related to either new places I was living, or new places I was going to…I was really a landscape.” In Blood, Sea (2004), Tschäpe creates a narrative experience centered on the surface of a body of water. In the video and photographs comprising the series, the perspective regularly shifts so the viewer is sometimes on a ship above the water, and sometimes enmeshed in the scene. Visually, this abstracts an aquatic landscape, highlighting a kaleidoscopic range of organic forms. Tschäpe has continued to explore related principles in recent years, as her cut-out paper sculptures embody organic elements of water, life and nature, and undergo a shift in perspective from horizontal to vertical perspective when completed and exhibited on a wall.
1998 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York
1998 Hochschule fur Bilende Kuenste, Hamburg, Germany
Ms. Tschäpe’s work will be featured in the exhibition Modernist Art from India: Radical Terrain.

About Artists on Art

In conversation withAssistant Curator Beth Citron, speakers from New York and international contemporary art scenes interact with and informally discuss the rich artistic traditions of the Himalayas and surrounding regions in relation to their own practices and processes.
Please meet at the base of the Spiral Staircase at 6:15 for all tours.
Admission to the museum’s galleries is free every Friday from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.