Doris Von Drathen

This Reader, edited and introduced by noted art historian and critic Gilda Williams, gathers the key critical writings across the artist's essential works as explored through the lens of art history, post-colonial theory, film analysis, and more. Catalogue essays and exhibition reviews on individual works are set alongside Tan's own substantial body of writing: essays, letters, scripts, project notes, as well as discussions of other -artists' work, from Chantal Akerman to Jeff Wall.

From egg tempera to chalk and oil paint, Janaina Tschäpe has mastered a style of painting that combines Nordic depth with supple, airborne line dancing. The author Doris von Drathen, an art historian specializing in Aby Warburg’s iconology, immediately recognized the Hamburg school in the German-Brazilian-American artist. Thus began a friendship and an inexhaustible dialogue about art. In the Wind’s Brushstrokes is a deeply personal monograph in two parts. Beginning with a studio talk, Janaina Tschäpe speaks about her art in detail to the author Doris von Drathen: her fears of the unpainted, the audacity of oil paint, and the tremendous test of courage in trusting one’s own hand at work. In the essay section that follows, von Drathen comments on Tschäpe’s painting, picture by picture, dispensing with theoretical categories in favour of detailed painterly observations that thoroughly examine the artist’s concept of nature.