Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of paintings by Düsseldorf based artist Jana Schröder that spans her two series Neurosox and Specshift. In each series, Jana has dealt with pictorial questions like: What does the familiar movement of handwriting do? What happens when handwirting becomes illegible? How is it possible to integrate the aesthetics of diagrams? What happens if there are only two layers? What happens if additional lawyers are suddenly added and new possibilities like eliminating particular gestures or lines, come to mind? What happens when the meshes of paint are applied so densely that it become visually difficult to vissually dissect the whole into ist individual elements? Schröder’s practice is a meditation on process and repetition, refusing the need to derive or represent intellectual meaning solely for the sake of being meaningful. Thus the meaning, if one must define it, is not born from an individual piece, a final destination, or a simple theory. This series as a whole to represent repetitious attempts to solve artistic problems and a seemingly infinite discovery of what lines are capable of. This is a continuation of her teachings from her professor and German painter Albert Oehlen who taught Jana at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. As a departure from previous paintings Jana has sought to generate deliberate lines of oil paint in opposition to casual and intitutive handwriting and scribble that dominated her canvases, but as in previous work Jana adheres to self-imposed rules that make her seemingly frenetic gestures merely a step in her rigorously structured paintings. While Jana views painting as a performative practice - one that can be spontaneous with liberating gestures, these gestures are part of a system that Jana has conceived throughout her practice. In the interview titled “Reset, Desire for Layers, Gelato” with curator, Christian Malycha, Schröder expounded on this aspect of her practice stating, “I enjoy setting rules just as much as I enjoy breaking them. Every broken rule becomes new, adapted rule afterwards.”
