LONDON.- 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 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.

Jacquie Maria Wessels’ work is often the result of a long-term immersion in a well-defined subject. The subjects mostly serve as a framework to explore people's various social conditions and surroundings. She delicately gives meaning to these elements and lets them subtly reflect in her distinctly colourite autonomous work.

Wessels’ work is exhibited worldwide and is included in the collection of several museums, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (NL), Musée de la Photographie Charleroi (BE), Huis Marseille – Museum for Photography Amsterdam (NL), Vincent van GoghHuis (NL) and the Surinaams Museum in Paramaribo (SR) and various corporate and private collections. In 2023, Ludion (BE) published the photo book "Garage Stills & Fringe Nature".

Galerie Baudelaire (Antwerp, Belgium), a gallery for international contemporary art photography, shows photography with a pronounced evocative character. Photography that surprises, intrigues, irritates and touches. Photography in which fantasy, imagination and individuality take the lead, in the spirit of the art criticism of Charles Baudelaire.