Photo London 2026, UK
Represented by Galerie Baudelaire, booth nr B08
Solo Exhibition: Jacquie Maria Wessels
May 14 - 17, 2026. Preview May 13.
At Photo London 2026, Galerie Baudelaire is presenting a solo show of work by the artist Jacquie Maria Wessels (NL), offering an overview of her recent artistic practice. The works on show explore the tension between nature and industry and enter into a layered dialogue with one another. Diverse in its thematic underpinnings, Wessels’ analogue photography is as poetic as it is sinister. Photo London’s eleventh edition marks an exciting new chapter as the UK’s leading photography fair launches in its new home at Olympia in Kensington.
Jacquie Maria Wessels is always searching for new ways with which to tell her story. While analogue photography remains the basis of her work, she is not bound by the medium or a two-dimensional surface. Increasingly, she pushes the boundaries of photography by combining it with other materials, such as textiles, like in her most recent series ‘In the Sky’ (2025) and ‘Memory Master’.
The analogue photos from the ‘Memory Master’ series are printed on delicate silk and represent memories of places you might have been. Mostly the memory is not clear with precise detail. It can work as an afterimage, vague sometimes with patches... The almost elusive impressionistic images evoke an atmosphere of fading memories.
For the ‘Garage Stills’ series Wessels visited various traditional auto repair garages all over the world, where she explored these wondrous spaces and created 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 that is gradually being supplanted by new, sterile technologies. ‘Garage Stills’ 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.
The tension between natural and industrial environments is further explored in Wessels’ new series,‘Dubious Appeal’. Here, too, we see flowers and plants. 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 may not be but could also be parts of a brightly coloured packaging.
Photo London 2026, The National Hall, Olympia, Hammersmith Road, London W14 8UX, UK. 14 – 17 May 2026, Thu/Fri 12 - 20, Sat 11 - 20, Sun 11 - 17. Preview: Wednesday 13 May 2026. Booth number Galerie Baudelaire: B08
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