Jacqueline Mesmaeker

Jacqueline Mesmaeker was born in Uccle (Belgium) in 1929. She worked for architecture firms from 1955 to 1961. From 1954, she studied fashion and design in the class of Georges (“Geo”) De Vlamynck at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Brussels, graduating in 1957. From 1962 to 1966, she worked as a stylist for Inno France and various textile manufacturers in the Hainaut region and in Flanders. She then devoted herself to the visual arts. In 1974, she began studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de Bruxelles/La Cambre (National School of Fine Arts in Brussels/La Cambre), specializing in painting and three-dimensional space with Jo Delahaut and urban space with Jean Glibert, which she completed in 1981 with a Master's degree. In 1977, she moved into her own apartment in Brussels, which served as her studio until the end of her life.
Mesmaeker taught for many years at renowned Belgian art universities: École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Wavre (1973-1994), École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels/La Cambre in Brussels (1981-1984), Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Mons (1981-1986) and ISLAP-ERG of the École de recherche graphique (School of Graphic Research) in Brussels (1982-1994).
In 1988, she received a special mention at the International Art Competition in New York for her outstanding achievements in the field of mixed media. In 1996 she received the Norwich EAST Award. In 2021 she was awarded the Association internationale des critiques d'art (AICA) prize.
She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (Belgium, 2018), the Fondation d'Entreprise Hermès in Brussels (2019), the Museumcultuur Strombeek/Gent (2020), the Bozar, Brussels (2020) and the Musée Raveel in Zulte (2021). The first retrospective in German-speaking countries was shown by the Generali Foundation Collection - on permanent loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2025).
Jacqueline Mesmaeker died in Brussels, Belgium, in 2023.

Jacqueline Mesmaeker began her career in the fields of fashion, design and architecture. From the 1970s onwards, she developed a formally reduced artistic practice based on conceptual thinking, which she combined with poetic sensibility in her own unique way and realized in a multidisciplinary way in various media. Her oeuvre includes sculptures and sculptural interventions as well as painting and drawing, photography, film and video, language and text.
As a child, Mesmaeker visited Vienna and Salzburg with her parents. She remembers the civil uprising in 1934, which was directed against Engelbert Dollfuß and his proclamation of a corporative state. During the “February battles”, she heard the gunshots of the battles between the workers and members of the Republican Protection League entrenched in the Karl-Marx-Hof and the Austrian army and Heimwehr. This memory is reflected in Mesmaeker's series “Les Charlottes”. Her works repeatedly contain selected political and literary references as well as confrontations with historical contexts, which she brings to the attention in a subtle and subversive way. An essential feature of her works is her sensitive awareness of the existential processes of remembering and forgetting as well as the psychological, political and aesthetic significance of the subtle and hidden. Mesmaeker experimented with different spatial, temporal and visual levels as well as sign and symbolic languages, creating new and surprising cross-connections.
Even in her early filmic works, Mesmaeker explored the film screen as an object. She is particularly fascinated by transparent screens - “permeable, barely localizable surfaces that dissolve into the light images of the projections”. She uses glass on the one hand and tulle fabrics as projection surfaces on the other.
The Generali Foundation Collection includes Surface de Réparation (1979), a remarkable multi-screen film installation by Jacqueline Mesmaeker. In this installation, she splits the image carrier into twelve transparent layers and has them illuminated from all directions by four film projections. The almost immaterial-looking screens create a multiplied, spatially fanned-out image that can be viewed from different perspectives. The title refers to the large rectangle in front of the goalkeeper's goal on the soccer pitch. At the center is a soccer game that is broken down into its individual parts and illusorily reassembled. For the film installation, the artist produced footage of amateur footballers playing with an invisible ball. This makes the players' body movements look like burlesque antics. The projections are based on three films: on the two outer screens, the players simulate typical movements of the game without the ball (two different films); on the ten central, diagonally layered screens, you only see the balls flying back and forth (in opposite directions, as the same film is projected onto the screens from two opposite positions). At certain points where the projections overlap, the players no longer step into the void, but hit the balls as if by chance, which were filmed in a night shot and therefore appear like points of light. Mesmaeker describes the installation as follows: "The film installation can be described as a deconstruction of a soccer match. On ten transparent screens made of silk tulle, two projectors project balls in an endless loop that move solitarily through the room, from left to right and from right to left. At an opening angle to these layered screens are two further translucent screens onto which [note: with two further projectors] players are projected, miming a soccer match without a ball. They only hit the ball by chance, depending on the coincidence of the film projections."
Mesmaeker is a central figure in the Belgian art scene. However, her artistic work was long overshadowed by her male artist colleagues, not least because of her critical attitude towards the art market. In recent years, her oeuvre, which has been consistently developed over five decades, has gained international recognition. Today, alongside Marcel Broodthaers and Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Mesmaeker is regarded as a formative personality in Belgian art since the 1970s. (Jürgen Tabor)