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.