Jana Schröder

Jana Schröder's work addresses the issue of the legitimation of contemporary painting, a claim that doesn’t just announce itself through an “attitude of subtraction,” but which relies on an image produced by the act of painting itself. She achieves this by creating an interaction of overlapping colors and layers of paint that create meaning not only on the basis of the gestures that created them, but also through their references to everyday acts of handwriting and scribbling. In combination with her use of colors, Schröder uses the aesthetics of these practices to create spontaneous and original aesthetic effects. She uses oil paint to slowly transition initials, signatures, abbreviations, and curls onto a large scale canvas, and by doing so, she manages to isolate and highlight their sheer form.

Her work doesn’t only embrace the act of painting itself, but is ultimately targeted towards aesthetic achievement. In some of the paintings, the indelible pencil, with its contemporary color scheme and its absurd chemical nature (it irrevocably fades when exposed to UV radiation), serves as the perfect platform for expressing gestures freely and as a finalizing act. Despite the extensive overlay of lines and gestures in theses works, the artistic process and the very act of painting remains visible as each layer is still traceable. Additionally, one ambiguous element remains: the background of the painting, although painted more swiftly and gesturally, is blurred and becomes an echo of the work’s dominant protagonist, i.e. the final, slowly and consciously completed line in oil paint. The casual and en passant manner in which the scribblings appear on canvas is not only contemporary in its visual style, but also suggests an energetic overlapping of different levels of meaning. This unique quality points us towards important questions within the genre of contemporary painting.

Schröder's work has appeared in a number of solo and group exhibitions at internatioal galleries including including Natalia Hug in Cologne; Reutlingen in Germany; Mier Gallery in Los Angeles; and has appeared in group exhibitions at New Galerie in Paris; and Temporary Gallery in Cologne. She lives and works in Dusseldorf. 

Courtesy of Mier Gallery