Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, is delighted to announce Restless Moraine, Janaina Tschäpe’s first solo exhibition in LA. This new body of work presents Tschäpe’s intricately layered abstract landscapes featuring imagery evocative of the natural world, suggesting growth, transition, and metamorphosis. Created entirely with oil paint and oil stick, these new paintings exponentially expand the artist’s investigation of the relationship between gesture and painting.

Tschäpe’s dynamic yet, carefully nuanced canvases evoke associations with nature that at times suggest both sea and land, as her atmospheric images shift subtly between representation and abstraction. In previous painting cycles, Tschäpe combined casein, watercolor, colored pencils and crayons with oil and oil stick; in this new body of work, she is working solely in oil.

With oil stick, Tschäpe feels she can “dive further into the layers” of the painting, creating much more fluid and gestural surfaces, while also creating distinct layers of stratification. Building up the image with large, sweeping brushstrokes provides a foundation and structure for Tschäpe’s vigorous compositions. In this manner, her signature mark making becomes embedded in both the foreground and background.

Tschäpe’s paintings are extremely physical compositions, reflecting the dynamic range of motion and intensity of focus the artist brings to their making. At the same time, these are contemplative and suggestive compositions that translate Tschäpe’s observations and memories of natural phenomena, such as changes in light, the movement of leaves, the rushing of water, and movement of the wind, into a language of abstraction that is at once lively and serene; deeply personal, yet open to interpretation.

“I want the brushstroke to conquer the canvas… To me, painting means feeling somethingright up close, being physically in the present with body and soul.” – Janaina Tschäpe