Lapse - Michelle Jezierski
Images of the Exhibition
Description
With the exhibition Lapse, Galerie Wolfgang Jahn presents its second solo show by Berlin-born American artist Michelle Jezierski. Jezierski, who lives and works in Berlin, studied at the University of the Arts Berlin under Tony Cragg and at Cooper Union in New York. She has developed a distinctive visual language in her paintings, where atmospherically charged landscapes are interwoven with translucent stripe elements and geometric-abstraction structures. This exhibition presents recent works that showcase the ongoing evolution of her individual technique and stylistic approach. Until recently, the paintings shown here were part of the solo exhibition Verge at the Schwartzschen Villa in Berlin and are featured in the accompanying catalogue.
Jezierski’s paintings captivate through the layering of simultaneous image planes. Her compositions begin with freely rendered, figurative color landscapes that are rhythmically segmented by overlapping and permeating transparent stripes and grid-like structures. These intrinsic abstract elements dissect the terrains into views that are sometimes perspectivally offset, resulting in a final remix on the picture plane that unsettles and disorients. Jezierski’s works evoke the idea of visual puzzles—offering dual imagery: the motif of the figurative landscape and its geometric fragmentation. However, the viewer is not forced into an “either-or” perspective, but rather invited into a “both-and” experience, removing any straightforward or linear interpretation. Jezierski herself describes her work as a painterly synthesis of “gesture and geometry,” where these opposing forces do not simply coexist on the canvas, but emerge through the fanning out of pictorial space into multiple layers and realities.
Her uninhabited landscapes are gestural color compositions that hint at natural elements—such as majestic cloud formations sweeping across the land. Executed in oil and acrylic, the paintings often appear delicate and transparent, reminiscent of watercolors. This, combined with pastel tones, imparts a sense of lightness and captures the fleeting nature of light and atmosphere. One frequently senses a merging of sky and earth, their colors flowing into one another to form a cohesive whole. Jezierski’s landscapes are not tied to any specific location. Instead, they are abstract color compositions that, through their technique and palette, become expressions of internal emotional states—ultimately functioning as atmospheric inner landscapes.
The segmentation and fracturing caused by transparent stripe elements—often vertical or diagonal—produce a defamiliarizing effect that disrupts the unity of the image. These interventions can be likened to visual distortions from old TV broadcasts or VHS tapes, which destabilize the illusion of the landscape image. The motif of the emotionally charged, even romanticized, landscape is thereby deconstructed, broken into parts, and critically reexamined. Like the cracks in the simulated reality of the Matrix film series, Jezierski introduces ruptures into the illusion. She creates this effect by “folding” the landscape, misaligning visual connections so that lines and elements shift within the image bands. Color-wise, she also offsets areas—juxtaposing lighter zones against darker shades of the same hue—creating a visual layering where background and foreground seem to continually interchange, like a woven pattern with perceptual depth.
Through this artistic approach, Michelle Jezierski dissolves the space-time continuum within the image. Her collaged visual segments combine multiple perspectives, suggesting different moments in time, and merging them into a composite whole. This evokes early stop-motion animation techniques, where motion is not generated through smooth transitions but through abrupt, jumpy sequences due to missing frames. Jezierski’s fragmentation of imagery mirrors how perception itself works—assembling impressions gathered over time into a mental image stored as memory.
In her latest series, Jezierski also incorporates translucent grid structures that divide the image into tiles, extending the vertical orientation of the stripes into a horizontal square format. These grid elements, which can also be read as enlarged pixels, sometimes overlay the landscape motif. At the seams—resembling stitched joints—independent tonal shifts emerge, with shimmering lines subdividing the image. In other sections, the landscape appears to overlay the grid, which there acts as a mediator between foreground and background, suggesting fragments of unrelated elements in the immediate foreground. The grid may also be interpreted as a nod to painting tradition, referencing a long-standing method for transferring motifs to larger surfaces such as murals.
In conversations, Jezierski frequently emphasizes her interest in fracture, in the seams that both connect and separate. She is drawn to the moment something begins to slip away—the tipping point or structural weak spot that functions as a transitional in-between state, a fleeting interstice where something is decided or falls apart.
The exhibition’s English title, Lapse, likewise refers to this momentary quality, acknowledging the temporal aspect central to Jezierski’s visual language. The term can be translated as “interval” or “passage of time.” Applied to her paintings, it encapsulates the simultaneity of different moments that are, in reality, sequential in time.
Dr. Veit Ziegelmaier
