SURFACE TENSION - Michelle Jezierski
Images of the Exhibition
Description
What happens when a rigorously organized pictorial order begins to slip? When grids, lines, and planes no longer serve solely as carriers of structure, but themselves come under tension?
With Surface Tension, Galerie Wolfgang Jahn presents the third solo exhibition of Berlin-based artist Michelle Jezierski. Following her widely noted presentations at the gallery—most recently Lapse — Jezierski now unveils a body of work in which her painterly practice evolves with striking consistency and, for the first time, extends into the spatial realm. Having studied at the Berlin University of the Arts under Tony Cragg, as well as at Cooper Union (with Amy Sillman) in New York, Jezierski has developed a distinctive visual language in which atmospherically charged fields of colour converge with geometric structures.
Drawing remains the point of departure for her work. From this early, intense engagement from within—the visual ordering, condensing, and abstraction of perception—the structural foundation of her oeuvre continues to emerge. Painting reveals itself as the logical continuation of this graphic mode of thinking: abstract, yet never merely formal. It unfolds instead within a field of tension between gesture and geometry, between deliberate placement and consciously admitted disruption.
Linear structures traverse the pictorial surface, condense, dissolve, or begin to glide. Shifts occur, bands fall out of sync, fields of colour start to vibrate. In works such as Level or Squint, a visual flicker arises that recalls digital interference. Certain zones appear like pixels within a fluid painterly continuum. Landscape is not depicted but experienced as a state of perception—an echo of light, water, or geological stratification—without ever settling into topographic certainty.
Since 2025, Jezierski has extended these inquiries decisively into space. For the first time, ceramic reliefs enter into direct dialogue with the canvas works. The grid, previously organized within the picture plane, now assumes a corporeal presence as a modular structure. Each element is modelled, incised, and glazed by hand. The technical process is as precise as it is open: while the shaping is subject to the artist's control, the firing process, with its chemical reactions and heat, cannot be completely planned. It is precisely this unforeseeable, almost “magical” moment that finds its final, rhythmic order in the mounting on wood.
A key work in the exhibition is Mni Sota (2025), whose title refers to the Indigenous meaning “land of reflecting waters.” It paradigmatically embodies Jezierski’s current position: pictorial spaces that appear as reflections—composed of shifts, overlays, and temporally offset layers.
With Surface Tension, Jezierski also returns to a central impulse of her education under Tony Cragg: sculptural thinking, which has long structured her painting, now finds an autonomous and rigorous counterpart in ceramics. The surface is under tension—it asserts itself not merely as a support, but as sculptural form. The order set into motion thus reveals itself not as a loss of structure, but as its transformation: from static grid to dynamic, spatially effective configuration.
Wilko Austermann
