carlier | gebauer is delighted to announce the third solo exhibition of New York-based artist Janaina Tschäpe with the gallery. Tschäpe approaches her ever-changing microcosm in ongoing series of re-readings and articulations, in multi-facetted attempts of performative approaches to the body, as an organ, a site of illegibility and mystery, of disintegration as well as of creation. Tschäpe’s early performances, her videos, photographies, sculptures, paintings and drawings are deciphering a sense of nature below the surfaces which disunite human life from that of its surroundings. Far from implying a simply idealisation of nature as man’s other, Tschäpe locates one within the other and relayers a worldview, which rises from the creations she mimics as much as from the formal strength of the artistic results of this mimesis. In Tschäpe’s art one finds an urge of expression, which employs whatever medium necessary to articulate a sense of vicinity that is translated into a world of its own, an expanding artistic body of work.

Tschäpe’s new series of watercolours condense different formats within themselves. The large scale, multi-coloured, densely filled and layered drawings are presenting their viewers with the transcriptions of a formal concentration as much as with those of a past action. Tschäpe’s watercolours embody, even though their forms remain shifting and ambiguous, a sharp sense of figuration in which the question of identification and recognition are transposed by that of an indiscernible affinity. Facing those large sheets of paper, one is drawn into a dimension of full colours, of round shaped, lingering and floating forms, the outlines of which never eface the artist’s past actions but expose them as being one characteristic of the colours, of the forms, and of the world which arises with them. Tschäpe’s drawings outsize their perceivers, seeing them means facing an interiority beyond the measures of oneself. Germano Celant remarked, that Tschäpe creates a world after the age of the cyborg, her mimetic trans-figurations do not fall back into the illusion of a given, but move forward into the spectres of an expanded sense of corporeality in which the classic figure of the nude seems to be inverted, turned inside out.