Biography

Jana Schröder’s art-making practice seeks to question the validity of traditional painting gestures. Her work is a meditation on process and repetition, refusing the need to derive or represent intellectual meaning solely for the sake of being meaningful. 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. She uses oil paints to slowly transition initials, signatures and abbreviations onto a large-scale canvas, and by doing so, she manages to isolate and highlight their sheer form. In other paintings, the indelible pencil, with its absurd chemical nature (it irrevocably fades when exposed to sunlight), serves as the perfect platform for expressing gestures freely and as a finalizing act. Jana Schröder (b. 1983, Brilon, Germany; lives and works in Düsseldorf) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Professor Albert Oehlen. She has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions at wellknown institutions, such as the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Kunstverein Heppenheim, Germany; T293, Rome; Natalia Hug, Cologne; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the Yves Klein Archives, Paris.