Jacqueline Mesmaeker
SIRIUS
2020
€485,00
Digital barite print, embossed print and silkscreen on paper
50 × 70 cm
Edition of 20 copies, signed and numbered by the artist on certificate
In stock
about this work
This edition combines a Barite print, installed in an embossed space, with silkscreened text. A ‘cascade of words’ shows parallel columns of words in which each column jumps back and forth around a central letter. Rather than contextualising the image, these words cloud our reading with a multitude of low and high cultural references. It is unclear what the accompanying image exactly depicts, though there’s a clear cosmologic reference through the title. Sirius is part of the constellation Canis Major and is the brightest star visible from any part of Earth. As is often the case in Mesmaeker’s practice, this work is about making the overlooked visible, about framing our gaze and generating meaning.
about Jacqueline Mesmaeker
The Brussels artist Jacqueline Mesmaeker initially worked in fashion, design and architecture, before developing an artistic practice in the 1970s that is both conceptual and poetic.
Mesmaeker’s work is elusive, like sand sliding between the fingers. It plays with time and space through a multitude of media – film, sculpture, photography, artist’s books, drawings, etc. She reflects on the major themes of art history – and the problems that artists historically struggle with: how a gaze, frame and space relate to each other, and how an image generates meaning.
As curator Guillaume Désanges writes in his text for Mesmaeker’s exhibition at La Verrière / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès: “erudite but non-academic, Jacqueline Mesmaeker’s work draws on the grand themes of the history of Western art: painting, figuration, historical subjects, nature, landscape, the frame, light etc. but as with Marcel Broodthaers, this appetite for classicism, and with it an element of pomp and circumstance, is continually distanced by a gentle, unspoken irony that lurks just beneath the surface – a critical mischievousness that allows the everyday and trivial to permeate the cracks in the edifice of classical solemnity.
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