Janaina Tschäpe: Wandelstern

Tschäpe reimagines the traditions of landscape painting and self-portraiture to explore the personal and universal experience of nature. With each of her paintings, Tschäpe carves out a space in which the sensations of nature—the first light of dawn, the morning dew, and gathering storms—can resurface.

Tschäpe created the series of large-scale paintings at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard from her studio in Brooklyn, New York as the restrictions of COVID-19 lifted from the city. Stepping out into the world, Tschäpe would return to paint intuitively from memory, asking herself, “how do you paint that movement or that atmosphere at the end of an afternoon in the summer and the feeling of that?”

Even at their most abstract, Tschäpe’s paintings speak to the forms of mountains, forests, and oceans. And yet, these works do not refer to specific places. They capture a physical, spiritual, and emotional response to the natural world. In an echo of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Romantic notion that human beings do not exist above or outside of nature, Tschäpe invites the viewer to become a part this landscape.

The second body of work featured at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard comes from Tschäpe’s ongoing series of selfportraits, which she began several years ago. Created each day, the self portraits map the interior landscape of the soul over time. These pictures are inspired by the transformation of a person through the influence of their environment. “It’s almost like a combination of the rain outside and how it makes me feel,” Tschäpe explains. “Then I make a portrait of that, of a grey day, or a sunny day, of a happy day or a sad day.”

In contrast to the culture of “selfies”, Tschäpe’s self-portraits do not represent the external body. Tschäpe counters the distorted versions of the self that are presented online by focusing upon an internal landscape of perceptions and emotions. Tschäpe highlights the influence of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in this exploration of the fluctuating self. Pessoa wrote under the guise of some seventy-two monikers in his masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (1982), transferring versions of himself with disarming honesty to the page. In the same way, Tschäpe’s paintings are an outpouring of body and soul.

Kilde: Galleri Bo Bjerggaard