JANA SCHRÖDER
RUDDYSYNC ILILAC
June 4 – July 9, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present RUDDYSYNC ILILAC, Schröder’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Eleven new paintings will be on view in Los Angeles from June 4 – July 9, 2022.
Ruddysync Ililac is a neologism comprised of “Ruddy lilac” and “Synchronisation”. It refers to the two colors that dominate Schröder’s new canvas works: English red and purple. When conceiving this new suite of works, the artist was compelled by the ideas of tonal discordance and un-photographability. She began by working with the color English red, exploring its extremity and aggression. According to Schröder, the color “destroys every painting because once it is on your paintbrush, English red heavily soils all other colors that touch it.” As viewers, we can appreciate its deep richness, but for painters, it is an aggressive color that asserts itself on all others that come into contact with it. In RUDDYSYNC ILILAC, she marries it to “the nasty, lightened lavender,” noting that both colors are almost impossible to photograph accurately. Through her understanding and use of English red as a color which resists all other colors, and her deployments of a color palette resistant to digital reproduction, Schröder has produced her most defiant body of work yet.
Schröder is known for a practice grounded in irreducible and frenetic painting techniques. A devoted formalist, she produces paintings which are largely governed by the action of the paint itself, resulting in webs of languid, curling brushstrokes that guide viewers’ roving eyes. Looping brushstrokes contain subtle variations in saturation, producing an effect of depth, like a many-layered web that advances towards and recedes from the viewer. Executed in large scales, with the eye of a meticulous colorist and a keen sense for composition, Schröder’s works recall both the moving, intuitive body and the still, conceptual mind.
Schröder’s practice is a meditation on process and repetition, slowness and speed. Her jostling maze of variously translucent and shaded coiling lines employ formal repetition to meditative effect. Furthermore, she repeated experiments with English red and lilac while conceiving the series, testing out the colors in many different canvas sizes. The slowness of her process characterized by experimental discovery also finds expression on her surfaces, which represent meticulously painted moments that might either be understood as negative space or positive shapes, depending on how one approaches the compositions. The deliberation of such moments is contrasted by sections of more frenzied, quickly-applied paint which register the trace of the artist’s decisive hand at work.
As much as RUDDYSYNC ILILAC is a formal meditation on color, depth, line, and speed, it also cultivates a potent carnality which impresses upon viewers. Perhaps some of the aggression Schröder attributes to the color English red might be due to its status as the color of raw meat, of blood, of flushed skin. Schröder’s cool-toned lilac forms a stark contrast to the voracity and vivacity of English red as applied by the artist, as though it were a lifeless body waiting to be animated by a most exquisite force.
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: Kunststation Sankt Peter, Köln; Aishti Foundation, Beirut; Kopfermann-Fuhrmann Stiftung, Düsseldorf; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; Kunstverein Heppenheim; Kunstverein Reutlingen; and Yves Klein Archives, Paris.