Artist: Janaina Tschäpe

Galerie Max Hetzler presents A gush of wind (Atemraum), a solo exhibition of new works by Janaina Tschäpe, her first with the gallery.

Over the course of three decades, German-Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe has developed a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, drawing, photography, performance, video art, sculpture, murals and installations. In her paintings and works on paper, Tschäpe presents dreamlike abstract landscapes inspired by the natural world and memory. Balancing fluidity with precision, her work is imbued with a universality that reflects the various topographies she calls home, from Germany to Brazil and the United States. In addition to her exhibited work, Tschäpe produces drawings and sketchbooks as part of her daily practice, continuously transferring her impressions onto paper. These sketches serve not only as a foundational process for her painting, but as an autonomous, expressive medium through which she navigates the porous boundaries of abstraction and narrative.

For this exhibition, a new selection of large canvas paintings is presented across the ground floor gallery space. Composed in oil and oil stick, organic forms seem to ebb and flow with the movement of water. The reflective aspect of observation occupies the artist, posing questions on how to translate sensory experiences, noises and memories into abstraction on the canvas. Colours bleed and pool into one another, as if in a state of osmosis, offset by loosely drawn structures in oil stick. The artist compares the resulting layers in her paintings to the softness of the sky when viewed through silhouetted tree branches. As well as nature, especially water and our experience of it, language in spoken word, poetry and physical expression informs much of Tschäpe’s work. Her paintings create a layered, open free flow, rather than an imposed narrative. Akin to conversation, her works allow the viewer to shift between background and foreground, first layer and last, with brushstrokes and gestures always remaining present and visible. Evoking fragmented memories, rather than imposing a strict architecture, Tschäpe captures moods in her paintings, encouraging viewers to add their own reading. The titles of her works are drawn from poetry and literary fragments, hinting at the artist’s deep engagement with text as a generative force. As the precise definition of words, which are often not translatable across languages and must therefore coexist as separate meanings, the titles are often a mix of Portuguese, English and German, and offer entryways into the artist’s internal world.

The starting point to the present exhibition is the large-scale triptych Me, as a landscape, 2025. It is painted as one work, over separate canvases hung closely together. The painting traverses the boundaries of its three individual canvases to form a harmonious entity, made up of the sum of its parts. A wholly abstract landscape, defined as such by its horizontal format and the organic shapes which resemble plants in a pond or waterfront, the triptych recalls the waterlilies of Claude Monet (1840–1926), which inspired the artist as a child.

In the upstairs space, a selection of works on paper is presented along one wall, facing a monumental painting titled Nostalgia de verão (summer craving), 2025. In these works, painted mostly in watercolour and pastel, drawing functions as a form of writing, a visual inscription, echoing the structures of language. This poetic impulse is central to Tschäpe’s practice: her marks operate like verses – elliptical, open-ended, suggestive – inviting a space for subjective reading and intimate encounter.

Janaina Tschäpe (b. 1973, Munich) lives and works in New York. Tschäpe’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre (2023–2024); CAC Málaga (2023); Sarasota Art Museum, Florida (2020–2021); Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (both 2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona (2014); Louis Vuitton Aventura Mall, Miami (2013); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2008); Contemporary Museum of Art St. Louis, Missouri (2006); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004–2005), among others.

Tschäpe’s work is in the public collections of institutions including 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collection Lambert, Avignon; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Mudam Luxembourg; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; S.M.A.K. – Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo; TBA21 – Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; and University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, among others.