Janaina Tschäpe: Conversations with the sea

words by Emily Holland

Hastings Contemporary is excited to present the first major solo exhibition in a UK gallery of

work by the leading German-Brazilian artist, Janaina Tschäpe.

Filling Hastings Contemporary’s largest gallery space, the exhibition features a dramatic new series of paintings and works on paper created by Tschäpe in direct response to her experience of visiting the wet and stormy Hastings in the winter of 2025. The works will be complemented by a film piece.

Speaking about the making of the show, Janaina Tschäpe explains: “For this exhibition by the sea, I have been thinking about water not as image, but as force – as movement that folds, accelerates, disperses, and returns. Water organises space through rhythm rather than contour. It resists fixation."

“The sea has always carried projection: solitude, longing, disappearance and myth. I am interested in that space not as narrative, but as atmosphere – as a psychological field where form dissolves and re-emerges. Memory, like the tide, is never still. It breathes the shore.”

Janaina Tschäpe, Meeresatem (Breathing the shore), 2025, oil and oil stick on linen

Spending her formative years in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Tschäpe, whose first name

references the Brazilian sea goddess of the Candomblé religion, has always been captivated by the notion of the sea as a gateway to mystical realms. Offering forays into the geological state of the psyche, blending geographical, astronomical and intimately humane concerns, her resulting large-scale, semi-abstract landscapes provide extraordinary tapestries of forms and lines. Their strangely evocative organic motifs define her own idiosyncratic language.

For Tschäpe, working across oil, oil stick and watercolour in these expansive paintings, the

dense band of extended horizon dividing sea from air holds a sense of compression and

contained energy. The diluted pigments and choreographed marks used to express the rhythm and movement of waves, converge like sediment and contrast with the bands of zinc white used to portray the salt sea air above.

Speaking about the watercolour works, Janaina Tschäpe states: “For me, the watercolours are less about describing the ocean than about entering into a dialogue with its movement. Across the works, drawing and gesture move like currents. The line attempts to hold structure; the brushstroke interrupts, dissolves, and redirects it. They overlap and resist each other, like tides meeting. The painting remains in tension – never fully resolved. ”

Spanning painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture and performance, Tschäpe’s work

draws on memory, sitting somewhere between abstraction and representation. By blending

lyrical abstraction and environmental themes, Tschäpe offers a fresh perspective that bridges

historical influences with post-modern sensibilities.

Kathleen Soriano, Director of Hastings Contemporary, notes: “Janaina Tschäpe brings the swell of the English Channel and the immensity of the world’s oceans into the heart of Hastings Contemporary where its power and majesty fill the Foreshore Gallery with glorious colour, light and dynamic movement. Presented alongside Miguel Rothschild’s dramatic seascapes, our summer visitors can step straight off the beach and into the gallery to encounter two strikingly different visions of our seas.”

The show is part of the summer season at Hastings Contemporary and will be on display

alongside Miguel Rothschild and Moore / Freud.