nca | nichido contemporary art

Venue: nca | nichido contemporary art
Date: 2. 25 (sat.) – 4.1 (sat.), 2023
Opening reception: 2. 25 (Sat.) 17:00~19:00 *Artist in attendance
Gallery hours: tue. – sat. / 11:00 – 19:00 （closed on sun., mon., and on national holidays）
Supported by: Embassy of Brazil in Tokyo

nca | nichido contemporary art is pleased to present "Something Like the Sun", Janaina Tschäpe’s new solo show, her sixth collaboration with the gallery. In the exhibition, the Brazilian-German artist presents a group of new paintings, including her well-known large-scale works as some of the most recent investigations of the artist in smaller sizes – some of which are amongst the smallest paintings the artist has ever produced in her trajectory.

If in many of the artist’s previous works, the use of materials such as casein, watercolor, colored pencils, and crayons would usually add a delicate sense of fluidity and transparency to the composition of her distinguished pieces, the present exhibition invites us to see the artist’s experimenting not only with oil as with oil sticks, a material that has been frequently used in her latest paintings, bringing the same effect of oil paint though through a deep sense of marking the canvas surface, as if the artist is trying to point here her work into a more rhythmic – and even jazz-like frenetic visuality that pops up when confronted by the spectator’s eyes.
If the oil sticks are known to leave thicker and more incisive marks in the paintings, their use appears here both as a powerful tool for abstract scenarios and denser landscapes as it also works well when the artist plays with the viewer's sense of vision: are we may be staring at an unnamable animal or, even further, at an ancient rock painting from a remote cave somewhere around the globe?
It is this unparalleled aspect of Janaina Tschäpe’s paintings that reaches its highest degrees of exploration and maturity, evident in the artist's present works, pieces where conventional categories such as abstract and figurative seem to date back to a time that we cannot even remember anymore. More than a surface designated to welcome different scenarios, characters, and many more possibilities, Tschäpe’s paintings invite us to a journey where knowing or not knowing are pretty much the same; taking us to a somewhat utopian time – hopefully in a near future – where our regimen of seeing is no longer limited by many of the contemporary distractions and blurs that deeply concerns us nowadays.
The artist may guide us to a time when the act of seeing will stand right by the side of the act of understanding, maybe even preceding the use of verbal language. Therefore, undoubtedly, the result should be a celebration of the endurance and power of painting. Janaina Tschape’s new works, for their part, remember us in a firm way that the good old medium (one of the oldest art forms in human history) will not go away any time soon. Or ever, hopefully.

Victor Gorgulho (Curator / Writer)

Janaina Tschäpe
Born in Munich (Germany), 1973, to a German father and a Brazilian mother; raised in San Paulo (Brazil). Lives and works between New York and Rio de Janeiro.
Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Sarasota Art Museum, Florida; the Musée L’Orangerie, Paris, France; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Kasama, Japan; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, and the Contemporary Museum of Art, St Louis. She has been featured in numerous group exhibitions at venues including NCA Taipei, Taiwan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; TBA21-Augarten, Vienna, Austria; CCBB, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Centre D’Art Contemporain de Normandie, France; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanazawa, Japan; and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan. Her work is found in important public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, Massachusetts; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo, amongst others.

Victor Gorgulho
Victor Gorgulho (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a curator, journalist, and researcher based in Rio de Janeiro. Graduated in Journalism from ECO-UFRJ. He holds a master’s degree in Visual Arts and Contemporary Culture from PUC-Rio. Curated the exhibitions We live in the best city of South America, along with curator Bernardo José de Souza (Atomos, Rio de Janeiro, 2016 and Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, 2017); The third world asks for a blessing and goes to sleep (Despina, Rio de Janeiro, 2017); I’ve always dreamed of a museum in fire – Laura Lima & Luiz Roque at Carlos Werneck’s Puppet Theater (Rio de Janeiro, 2018); Perdona que no te crea (Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro, 2019). Co-curator, with Keyna Eleison, of the exhibition Engraved in the body, at Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, February 2021, with iteration to the United States at Tanya Bonakdar, New York, in 2022. As a journalist, he worked as assistant editor of culture for Jornal do Brasil (2014-2017) and today collaborates with vehicles such as El País Brasil. Co-organizer, along with critic and curator Luisa Duarte, of the book When the world trembles – Essays and interviews in the light of the pandemic (Editora Cobogó, 2020). In 2021, was awarded the grant of guest curator of Pivô Art & Research (São Paulo, Brazil) international program Satellite and since then has been appointed Chief-Curator at Instituto Inclusartiz, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, founded and directed by Frances Reynolds.