Publications

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Jacqueline Mesmaeker. Secret Outlines

Edited by Harald Krejci and Jürgen Tabor for the Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

With writings by Hildegund Amanshauser, Jean-Michel Botquin, Saskia de Coster, Guillaume Désanges, Olivier Mignon, Nina Schedlmayer, Jürgen Tabor, and a foreword by Harald Krejci.

The publication accompanying the retrospective Secret Outlines offers the German- and English-speaking reader a comprehensive and richly illustrated overview of the extraordinary oeuvre of the Belgian artist Jacqueline Mesmaeker (1929 Uccle, BE—2023, Brussels, BE).

The essays by the international authors Hildegund Amanshauser, Jean-Michel Botquin, Saskia de Coster, Guillaume Désanges, Olivier Mignon, Nina Schedlmayer and Jürgen Tabor explore various aspects of Mesmaeker’s work. They address the unique poetic and conceptual character of her works, the shifts in her artistic career, her engagement with women’s lives, her particular interest in literature and history, her film and video work, and the combination of reduction and suggestion as an artistic method.

The visual design of the book was conceived by Studio Fjeld and realized according to the criteria of sustainable production.

Jacqueline Mesmaeker's work defies simple categorization. Almost effortlessly, she weaves together a wide range of media and methods: her works intertwine image, language, and space; film, photography, and drawing; sculpture, readymade, and intervention. Mesmaeker’s art also opens new doors for works of literature, transposes the painterly register into film and film into three dimensions, and works with found objects and materials to unleash their narrative power. In art-historical terms, her oeuvre may be categorized as a blend of post-minimalism and post-conceptualism with the Belgian traditions of Symbolism and Surrealism.