“All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.”
This is how, in his essay “The School of Giorgione” (1877), the British essayist and art critic Walter Horatio Pater describes the convergence of form and content in music and its ability to give expression to the sensual by abstract means.
Even though Margarete Jakschik’s images are always representational, in them there is a palpable resonance with Pater’s statement. This is not only due to the titles of her photographs usually being borrowed from various songs. It has to do with something more fundamental. For, rather than a particular situation or specific moment, it is a mood or tone that her photographs capture. That which we associate with both the big and little moments that constitute a life, and which only with difficulty can be grasped in words (or images): the warmth on skin in a summer meadow; a leafy, overgrown dream of faraway places; the hushed silence of a last look into an empty room before departing.
Margarete Jakschik’s images are made with an analogue medium-format camera. The photographs are personal, at times of an intimate closeness, and yet give little away about themselves.
This is also what lends them their quality of not merely depicting this place or that experience. These are images that we will inevitably fill with our own memories—just as we end up associating more of what is our own, rather than what is someone else’s, with a song that has long accompanied us.
Patrizia Dander, Head of Curatorial Department, Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (Excerpt from a text published on the occasion of Margarete Jakschik´s exhibition ´Archives of Doubt´, May 2023)
Margarete Jakschik (*1974 in Ruda Slaska, Poland) lives and works in Los Angeles. Studied at the Academy of Arts, Düsseldorf (Thomas Ruff).
She has been featured in group exhibitions at Neues Museum, Nürnberg (2021), Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren (2021), Museum für Photographie Braunschweig (2020), Marta, Herford and Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d’ art contemporain, Bignan, France. Jakschik had recent solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg.
The artist is represented in the institutional collections of the Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf and Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.