Elizabeth Jaeger

  • itself & else, 2022, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • How to Survive, 2020, Sprengel Museum, Hannover

  • Brine, 2019, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • Elizabeth Jaeger: Gutted, 2021, Mister Fahrenheit, New York, photo: Brad Farwell

  • Piece of Cake, 2021, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, photo: Marten Elder

  • Mirror Cells, 2016, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York / Photo: Genevieve Hanson

  • Pommel, 2017, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York

  • In Practice: Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New, 2016, Sculpture Center, New York / Photo: Kyle Knodell

  • 6:30, 2014, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York

  • Serving Vessels, 2013

About the artist

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’.

If earlier series by the artist focused on a direct engagement with the representation and (socio) cultural gaze on the female body and figuration, Elizabeth Jaeger has recently been working with an ambivalent formal language all her own. Borrowed from amorphous shapes and fantasy, abstract forms based on flora and fauna are combined with strictly geometric steel constructions and thus given a psychological dimension: they are physical objects and at the same time vessels for the ‘soul’ and the world of thoughts. In this way, Jaeger opens a gaze on complex structures between organic objects made with the human hand and questions material and ideational binaries. Her sculptures become organic, viscerally treated ‘material’, existential intellectual games on thingly truths, and the possibility of embodying an emphatic and critical spirit.

Publications

  • Denude

    In Denude, Jaeger has assembled the drawings into a flip book of a twisting figure, flattening any spatial or temporal context. The drawings are aligned by the belly button to the same spot on each page, with the same radius to the nipples and the crotch. This edition is hardcover clothbound, and organized double-sided so that if all the pages were transparent, the torsos would superimpose to make one form.