JANA SCHRÖDER
MOTHER
MARCH 11 – APRIL 10, 2021
Mother dear, she already knows
Mother dear, she'll never let me go
Mother dear, kept me warm and safe
Mother dear, I'll never lose my faith in Mother dear
The Divine Comedy, Mother dear, 2006
Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce its first solo exhibition of German artist Jana Schröder in the Brussels location. It will be on view from March 11 to April 10, 2021.
Contemplating her exhibition, Jana Schröder confessed: »If I was a singer, this would definitely be my most personal album«. No wonder, given alone the show’s title—MOTHER. After a year of social distortion and emergency, she gave in to her desire for “proper” paintings and works on paper. Knowing full well of all clichés, stereotypes and attributions, undoubtedly evoked by any »motherly sentiment«. Obviously, something was amiss, she cravingly longed for.
Now, alternating on each floor, red and almost carnal paintings as well as clear blue drawings are intricately intertwined throughout the gallery. Schröder employs red and blue not only as complementary contrasts. She rather lets them act out the full range of associations and emotions. For their relation is far more than antithetical, like a one-dimensional distinction between warm and cold. Both colours, though opposites, share certain qualities.
The lush and swaying reds are just as caring as they are alluring. The sharp blues are simultaneously rigid and soothing. Their paradoxical bond reaches even further, as the red’s warm embrace can be found in decisively resolute paintings and the cool and edgy drawings instantly blossom into an open tenderness.
But it doesn’t end there. Schröder fundamentally challenges all painterly means and conventions. Everything at her disposal—colours, backgrounds and foregrounds, spontaneous gestures, lapses of memory, calculated marks, alleged rules, social roles, even her own motherhood—blends into each other and inseparably becomes one.
And in case, you are now wondering, what to make out of all this, as Neil Hannon said: »Mother dear, she already knows« …
Jana Schröder (b. 1983, Brilon; lives and works in Düsseldorf) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the class of Albert Oehlen. Since 2009, numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions, among others: Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; Kunstverein Heppenheim; Kunstverein Reutlingen; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Yves Klein Archives, Paris.