Janaina Tschäpe

Janaina Tschäpe was born in Munich, Germany, in 1973 and was raised largely near São Paulo, Brazil, a dual upbringing reflected in the German-Brazilian identity she is consistently described by in gallery and museum sources. She earned a BFA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, completed in 1997, followed by an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, completed in 1998. She now lives and works primarily in Brooklyn, New York, with a continuing base in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Her practice spans painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, installation, and performance, built around recurring aquatic, plant-like, and hybrid bodily forms that dissolve the line between figure and landscape. An early photographic series, 100 Little Deaths, established this interest in the body submerged in and transformed by landscape, and has been the subject of dedicated museum discussion. Over the following two decades her work moved into large-scale painting and public commissions, supported by residencies including the Roger Ballen Foundation in Johannesburg (2009) and two Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) expedition residencies, in the Galápagos (2013) and Fiji (2014).

She is currently represented by Galerie Max Hetzler, Sean Kelly, and Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, and her recent institutional exhibitions include a presentation at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2025 to 2026) and a solo presentation at Hastings Contemporary in the United Kingdom (2026).

Critical and curatorial writing on Tschäpe centers on her fusion of the bodily and the landscape, treating her figures and forms as sites where the visible and the visceral meet. Her institutional trajectory, from an early museum residency in Salvador, Brazil, in 1994 through recent presentations at the Reina Sofía and Fundação Iberê Camargo, has been read as evidence of sustained curatorial confidence in an artist whose work resists easy categorization within a single movement.

Tschäpe's auction market is small relative to her institutional profile. Her current auction record is USD 120,000, set by the 2016 painting Sky for Mina at Sotheby's New York on 21 November 2024, a result that HENI's market reporting notes surpassed her previous high, Square Soap Bubbles, which sold for USD 81,200 at Christie's on 20 November 2015. Most of her market activity to date runs through her three representing galleries rather than the secondary market, and public auction appearances remain infrequent enough that any single result should be read as a data point rather than a trend line.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Tschäpe, so provenance and authenticity questions should be directed to her representing galleries: Galerie Max Hetzler, Sean Kelly, and Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel. Her auction record is recent, set in November 2024, and her secondary market to date has produced few results, so pricing signals from auction remain limited compared to the depth of her museum presence. Collectors should treat her institutional collection list and steady program of museum exhibitions as the stronger indicator of long-term standing, while recognizing that her auction market is still early in its formation.