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Margarete Jakschik

Archives of Doubt

May 25 – July 7, 2023

“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 were made with an analogue medium-format camera. She took them while on a road trip to New Mexico and in her immediate surroundings in Los Angeles. 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

Margarete Jakschik (*1974 Ruda Śląska, Poland) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Thomas Ruff. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Her works are part of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.

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