Galerie Baudelaire presents

Jacquie Maria Wessels
Garage Stills & Fringe Nature

Photo London
16 – 19 May 2024

Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA, UK
Booth E03

Thu/Fri 13 - 20, Sat 12 – 20, Sun 12 – 18

At Photo London 2024, Galerie Baudelaire (Antwerp, BE) proudly presents a solo show with photography by the Dutch artist Jacquie Maria Wessels from her analogue series Garage Stills and Fringe Nature. Her painterly images with a surprising colour palette and lighting are as rough as they are poetic.

For her Garage Stills project, Wessels has travelled round the world, to places including Japan, Cambodia, Poland, South Africa, Italy, Belgium, Cuba, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands, chasing her fascination for the wondrous universe of traditional auto repair garages in various cultures. In classic, striking garages she creates still lifes on the spot with the intriguing and personal objects she finds there. It is the shapes and the colours of those mysterious pieces that draw her attention. At the same time, the images bear witness to a disappearing, predominantly male world.

Wessels then turned her camera outside and started to work on her new photographic series Fringe Nature: in the immediate vicinity of the garages, she is struck by the nature that endures in the harsh, industrial landscapes on the outskirts of the cities. Although the viewer’s sensation is one of being immersed in a wild and natural place, small details within these images – a crane, a chimney or an abandoned rusty car – betray the presence of a factory or auto repair garage. Her precisely composed photographs show nature’s drive to reclaim its own space.

Artist Jacquie Maria Wessels lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; she studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Social Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit, both in Amsterdam. Her work is often the result of a long-term immersion in a well-defined subject. The subjects mostly serve as a framework for exploring people's various social conditions and surroundings. She delicately gives meaning to these elements and allows them to subtly reflect in her distinctly colourite autonomous work.

Wessels’ work is exhibited worldwide and is in the collection of various museums and private collections including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (NL), Musée de la Photographie Charleroi (BE), Huis Marseille – Museum for Photography Amsterdam (NL), Vincent van GoghHuis (NL) and the Surinaams Museum in Paramaribo (SR). In 2023, Ludion (BE) published the photo book Garage Stills & Fringe Nature, Musée de la Photographie Charleroi showed the solo exhibition "Garage Stills & Fringe Nature" and "Garage Stills" were on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in the exhibition "New Horizons".

Galerie Baudelaire (Antwerp, Belgium), a gallery for international contemporary art photography, shows photography with a pronounced evocative character. Photography that surprises, intrigues, irritates and touches. Photography in which fantasy, imagination and individuality take the lead, in the spirit of the art criticism of Charles Baudelaire.

More information:

www.galeriebaudelaire.be
www.jacquiemariawessels.nl
photolondon.org