Elizabeth Jaeger | itself and else | KLEMM’S | 13.03.-23.04.2022

until 23.04. | #3364ARTatBerlin | KLEMM’S presents from 13th March 2022 the solo exhibition itself and else by the artist Elizabeth Jaeger. It is the second solo exhibition by Elizabeth Jaeger at the gallery.

With her objects and sculptures, Elizabeth Jaeger succeeds in exploring the relationship between corporeality and perception, between consciousness and emotion. Often engaging with the insights of a personal experience or the observation of a situation, her works create environments that are mildly surreal and focus on the interconnectedness of all living beings. Her materials are simple, but haptic and ‘auratically’ charged: clay, ceramics, plaster, steel, silk and glass are means to create a new visual vocabulary: strangely familiar, yet always ‘off by two degrees’.

Elizabeth Jaeger’s new solo show creates a meditative space that uses dark matter as starting point of an intimate observation. The walls are inhabited by anthropomorphic black ceramic vessels, placed on steel structures in a game of precarious and surreal balances. The diffuse emotionality radiated by these monolith-like beings is consciously broken by the hardness and severity of the material. Floating objects as vessels for the soul, heavy in the fragility of their existence.

One could approach Elizabeth Jaeger’s work as an investigation process that uses contemplation as a means to catch a glimpse of reality hidden behind material surfaces. Embodied with a kind of personhood or eloquent presence, her sculptures stare back intensely at the viewers and place them in a position of necessary vulnerability.

Forms that return, that evolve and that seem to deceive the gravity and weight of the current historical moment. In the making of these new works, the artist carried out an action of re- appropriating and revisiting old objects and familiar shapes with renewed intentions, creating uncanny sculptural beings that seek to detach themselves from reality – yet remaining inevitably rooted in it.

Elizabeth Jaeger’s new solo show doesn’t narrate a story, but rather engages in undefined narratives that expand beyond verbal language. Her works evolve in a fluid progression of weights and shapes, solids and voids, which flow naturally, developing a new language that explores different rhythms, pauses, harmonies. There is a musical component in the rupture and reunion of this visual flow; a hidden melody, falling in and out of an intimate rhythm, softly vibrating through the depth of monochromatic shadows.

Elizabeth Jaeger (born in 1988) attended Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and École Nationale Supérieur des Arts in Nancy. Her most recent solo exhibitions include: Piece of Cake, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Holes, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2021); Gutted, Mister Fahrenheit, New York (2021); before making profound statements use a pencil with a good eraser (2020), Hours (2019), Pommel (2017) at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York and Brine at KLEMM’S, Berlin (2019). Her works have also been on view in numerous group shows, such as Mirror Cells at the Whitney Musuem of American Art; Greater New York at MoMA’s PS1; Practice: Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New at Sculpture Center, NY. Her works have been featured in the following publications: Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramics in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2017), Dreamers Awake (White Cube, 2017), Eros C’Est La Vie (Totem, 2013) and How Other People See Me (Publication Studio, 2011). Elizabeth Jaeger is the cofounder of Peradam, a publisher of artists’s books, together with Sam Cate Gumpert.

Opening: Saturday, 12th March 2022, 6:00 – 9:00 pm. 

Exhibition dates: Sunday, 13rd March – Saturday, 23rd April 2022

Image caption: Art at Berlin – courtesy by Klemms and Elizabeth Jaeger

Exhibition Elizabeth Jaeger – KLEMMS | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin