Artist: Jana Schröder

In her third solo exhibition at Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Jana Schröder is showing paintings from her latest series and exhibition title giving - FRONTRACK - as well as small-format works on paper from the BLACKRA series in the upper cabinet rooms.

On entering the main room of the gallery, one is inevitably confronted on the one hand with the broad color palette of her large-format canvases, and on the other with the tangled pictorial world in which forms of her various painterly settings assert themselves with and against each other, which can be understood as a reflection of the processing of information.

Jana Schröder sets her surfaces in motion with a multitude of signs: long lines with intervals of particularly rich colors, closed, translucent forms and seemingly unconscious scribbles, which have been a trademark of her painting style for years. On the painting surface, irregular and organic-looking surfaces and forms unfold, as well as winding and flowing lines, which - held by a monochrome painterly background - create complex pictorial spaces. The complexity arises from the superimposition of numerous layers that evoke the dynamics of figure and ground. A characteristic painterly element of the FRONTRACK series are the squeegeed areas that reveal the painter's gesture and movement in the pictorial space in a kind of duel next to, above and below their precisely placed counterparts of opaque areas. Her supposed showmanship is thus put in its place. The exhibited small-format works on paper made of ink or shellac function autonomously. Reduced in their color spectrum, the lines and surfaces of the painterly composition exploit the fluidity of the painting medium - from watery to binding.

Jana Schröder (*1983 in Brilon) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Albert Oehlen's class. Following NEUROSOX - Lapse of Memory (2021) and PERLASYNTHICS & PoMu (2023), she is once again showing a new series of works at Galerie Bärbel Grässlin with FRONTRACKS. She lives and works in Düsseldorf.