HAMBURG.- In her work, the Berlin-based artist Johanna Jaeger (* 1985 in Heidelberg) makes time and light as the main constituents of the photographic process a conceptual and motivic theme. To this end, she has developed a characteristic pictorial language that revolves around fluid ephemera such as clouds, colour gradients, and the processual dissolution of form; all this ties in with phenomena of light and exposure and also addresses the sedimentation of the solid as a photographic metaphor. In her first solo exhibition clouds & pebbles at the Drawing Room, Johanna Jaeger constructs a framework with the two installation works, sky piece and river pebble (horizontal split_1-∞) (both 2021), thus literally proclaiming the exhibition a "picture space". From this, she unfolds a field of tension for her photographic tableaus as well.

The photo series clouds & pebbles (making 2 of 1) (2020) follows on directly from this installation-like setting. In this four-part conceptual still life, Jaeger staggers different pictorial levels: A marbled stone slab and a piece of sky function as space-simulating backgrounds. They are recognizably photographs; here, Jaeger works consciously according to the picture-within-a-picture method. The fact that a polished stone surface forms the sky while a photograph of the cloudy sky forms the ground is obviously a parallel to the reversal of perceptual coordinates in sky piece and river pebble. Through such stagings and exaggerations, Jaeger succeeds in interpreting categories of the photographic in a poetic way.

In this sense, the diptych blue swirl / inverse fall (2021) combines two different motifs to form a visual-poetic chord. Here, too, it is a matter of diffusion processes and the parallelization of different temporal horizons. While one of the motifs can be deciphered as autumn leaves with an idiosyncratic mismatch of colours (a yellow-blue contrast that appears again and again in her work), the other takes up the sky motifs that characterize sky view and clouds & pebbles, but apparently carries them further towards abstraction.

As always in Jaeger's photography - everything is revealed openly, choreographed irritations of the gaze and deceptions of the eye lead us back again and again to the media-related conditions of the photographic.

Johanna Jaeger (*1985 in Heidelberg) studied Fine Arts at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts Montpellier, the University of the Arts Berlin and at Hunter College New York where she graduated with an MFA in 2014. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in solo exhibitions at Galeria Starter Warsaw, Playground London, Schwarz Contemporary Berlin, Grand Palais Bern, Platform Brooklyn and Plattenpalast Berlin, as well as in group exhibitions at Brandenburgischer Kunstverein Potsdam, Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, Kunstverein Speyer, Kunstsaele Berlin, Schwules Museum Berlin, 205 Hudson Gallery New York, Kunstraum Seilerstraße Hamburg and Zeppelinmuseum Friedrichshafen.