Galerie Baudelaire presents

Jacquie Maria Wessels
Garage Stills & Fringe Nature

Photo London
15 – 18 May 2025

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

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

At Photo London 2025, Galerie Baudelaire [BE] presents a solo show of work by artist Jacquie Maria Wessels [NL] from her new photo series Dubious Appeal, complemented by work from her photo series Memory Master, Fringe Nature and Garage Stills. Diverse in their thematic underpinnings, Wessels’ analogue photography is as poetic as it is sinister. The tenth edition of Photo London takes place from 15 – 18 May 2025 at the iconic Somerset House, bringing the world’s finest photography to the British capital.

In her new series Dubious Appeal, Jacquie Maria Wessels explores the tension between nature and industry. The flowers, colours and shapes of the compositions seduce the viewer - but at the same time have something threatening. They play with the (unconscious) appeal of enticingly designed packaging articles with patterns and shades inspired by nature. Not everything is what it seems in these sometimes dark analogue photographs, what appear to be flowers do not have to be but can also be parts of a brightly coloured packaging. Material that is destined to be thrown away finds itself amongst its figurative counterparts.

For her Garage Stills project, Wessels has travelled around the world, to places including Japan, Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Greece, Morocco, 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. At the same time, the images bear witness to a disappearing, predominantly male world that is gradually being supplanted by new, sterile technologies. This series can be seen as the precursor to Fringe Nature, in which Wessels looks beyond the auto repair garages and turns her lens to the traces of nature in their immediate vicinity. Her precisely composed photographs show nature’s drive to reclaim its own space.

Memory Master has a similar visual language to Dubious Appeal and Fringe Nature in the painterly depictions of nature. These analogue photographs represent the memory of places you may have been. For the series Memory Master Vincent van Gogh Garden Zundert, Wessels created works that draw onto memories of the young Vincent's likely observations. She photographed the environment where Vincent van Gogh grew up as he might remember it afterwards. The photos show an impression of this nature, a subject that appeared frequently in Van Gogh's later works. The photographs are printed on light silk fabrics, which emphasizes the image of poetic, elusive afterimages.

Jacquie Maria Wessels’ work is often the result of a long-term immersion in a well-defined subject. The subjects mostly serve as a framework to explore people's various social conditions and surroundings. She delicately gives meaning to these elements and lets them subtly reflect in her distinctly colourite autonomous work.

Wessels’ work is exhibited worldwide and is included in the collection of several museums, including the Rijksmuseum n 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) and various corporate and private collections. In 2023, Ludion (BE) published the photo book Garage Stills & Fringe Nature.

The artist 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.

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