Jana Schröder: Perlasynthics at Nino Mier Gallery
January 28 – February 26, 2023
All images courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery and Jana Schröder
PR – Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce an exhibition of new acrylic paintings by Düsseldorf-based painter Jana Schröder. PERLASYNTHICS marks both Schröder’s New York debut as well as the grand opening of Nino Mier’s first space in the city. The exhibition will be on view from January 28 to February 25, 2023, at 62 Crosby St in SoHo, with an opening reception from 6-8 pm on Saturday, January 28.
Developed in 2022, PERLASYNTHICS is Schröder’s most emotive and pictorially riotous body of work yet. Schröder agitates her surfaces with a variety of marks: long lines containing intervals of deep saturation; closed, translucent forms; and seemingly unconscious scribbles, a hallmark of her practice for years. Schröder fills in some sections of her coiling linework to create irregular shapes, leaving others as empty, white voids that evoke figure-ground dynamics.
The works were all conceived on a three-part rubric: first, an investigation of the tug-of-war between form and its lack; second, a durational constraint posed by fast-drying acrylic; and third, a uniquely expanded color palette. While Schröder’s previous series have largely been restricted to dual-toned palettes, her most recent ones leave no major color unused, evoking a lively, almost musical dissonance. In the spirit of Josef Albers, color is both form and content, means and end.
In moving to acrylic for this series, the artist grappled with a new set of physical constraints posed by the quick-drying nature of the paint, executing the entire body of work on the floor for the first time.
Collapsing the categorical divide between action and object, PERLASYNTHICS follows a lineage of artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Sonia Gechtoff to prioritize the gestural power of painting. For Schröder, painting is the medium best suited to register the motions and emotions of the artist and unmoor those of the beholder. PERLASYNTHICS is a meditation on painting’s physicality, both in terms of the creative process, and of a painting’s power to move through and affect a viewer.
Like footprints on a snowy path, each mark on the canvas registers the artist’s body at work. Schröder’s painting possesses a kind of performative corporeality, closing the distance between the act of painting and the act of seeing and creating a palpable intimacy between the viewer and the artist.
Jana Schröder (b. 1983, Brilon; lives and works in Düsseldorf) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the class of Albert Oehlen. Since 2009, she has been the subject of numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions, including at: Aishti Foundation, Beirut; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg; Kopfermann-Fuhrmann Stiftung, Düsseldorf; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; Kunstverein Heppenheim; Kunstverein Reutlingen; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Sammlung Grässlin, St. Georgen; Sankt Peter, Cologne; and the Yves Klein Archives, Paris. Gallery presentations include: Skarstedt Gallery, Paris; Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt am Main; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, Brussels and New York; and T293, Rome. Her work is part of the public collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Friedrichs Foundation, Bonn / Weidingen; and Miettinen Collection, Helsinki / Berlin.
