Market Art Fair

Abstract Terrains: The Landscapes of Tschäpe & Kirkeby

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Janaina Tschäpe, Clustered Autumn. Courtesy of Galleri Bo Bjerggaard

At Market Art Fair 2025, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard presents an exhibition featuring Brazilian-German artist Janaina Tschäpe and Danish-born Per Kirkeby.

These two artists, from different generations, share a common fascination with landscape painting, though their approaches and expressions differ significantly. The booth offers a meeting of two perspectives on nature, exploring how each artist interprets and represents the natural world through their unique visual languages.

Janaina Tschäpe’s multidisciplinary work embraces aquatic, plant, and human life, exploring the transformation of sensuous forms evocative of the natural world.

Spanning painting, drawing, photography, video, and sculpture, her sublime visual language exists in the nebulous space between representation and abstraction. She seeks a “fluid dialogue between drawing and painting, both melting into each other,” wherein her compositions and landscapes feature colorful, amorphous shapes and organic structures – layered, overpainted, and drawn upon in carefully calibrated hues.

  • Photo by Eduardo Ortega
  • Janaina Tschäpe, Dancing in the Dark. Courtesy of Galleri Bo Bjerggaard

Throughout her artistic practice, she explores the experience of being underwater, where dimensions and perspective dissolve. The sea plays a central role in her photographs and videos, featuring floating creatures reminiscent of jellyfish or squid and women’s bodies entangled with flowing fabric and balloons.

Tschäpe investigates both inner and outer landscapes, with bold brushstrokes reflecting the expanses and forms of nature, while more refined strokes express the mental states of humanity. Her paintings open a dialogue between the mind and nature, merging the personal with the universal.

With a background as a trained Arctic geologist, Per Kirkeby approached the landscape from a scientific perspective. Fascinated by both the natural and built environment, he continuously explored and interpreted the structures of nature.

An early member of ‘Eks-skolen’ (The Experimental Art School), his approach remained iconoclastic throughout his career. He once stated, “The role of art is to accept that things break down. That is the only way to get something new to emerge.”

  • Per Kirkeby. Courtesy of Galleri Bo Bjerggaard
  • Per Kirkeby. Courtesy of Galleri Bo Bjerggaard

Known for his diverse practice, Kirkeby fearlessly combined painting, sculpture, and printmaking, employing a multitude of techniques to explore the tensions between abstraction and representation. Recurring motifs of architecture, structures, rocks, figures, flora, and fauna appear within a broad palette ranging from radiant hues to earthy tones and deep inky blacks.

In his sculptures – hand-modeled in plaster and later cast in bronze – he captured the forms of nature, a language he translated into his paintings.

Galleri Bo Bjerggaard’s presentation at the fair in May brings Tschäpe’s paintings into conversation with Kirkeby’s sculptures, creating a dynamic interplay between two distinct yet complementary approaches to landscape and the forms of nature.