Jacqueline Mesmaeker
Versailles - Le Château
2023-2024
20 photographs in a paper sleeve
Sleeve: 9.2 x 6.5 x 0.7 cm / Photographs: 8.8 x 6.3 cm
Edition of 94 copies numbered and stamp-signed, plus 20 artist’s proofs
This edition, the sixth produced by Jacqueline Mesmaeker for Keijiban, was conceived and developed in the last several months before her sudden passing in December 2023, at the age of 94. It consists of the reproduction of a small tourist portfolio of Versailles – except that the twenty black-and-white photographs of the Palace it once contained have been replaced by as many views taken by Mesmaeker in her Brussels home. Instead of the Galerie des Glaces, Louis XIV’s bedroom or Marie-Antoinette’s Grand Cabinet, we are given a fragment of wallpaper, a messy worktable, or a bookcase decorated with figurines.
Here we find two motifs that have been essential to the construction of Jacqueline Mesmaeker's work: her studio-apartment and Versailles. For her, the former was not only the place where her artistic practice took place on a daily basis; it was also a subject matter and a material in and of itself. As for the latter, at least since the seminal work "Versailles avant sa construction" (1980), it has been the pretext for investigating the backstage of History, with her typical blend of admiration and mischief. The convergence, if not the ultimate fusion, of these two motifs acquires a poignant dimension here. For despite the obvious irony of the gesture, it is as if the artist recognized that it was time for her to become, in turn, a piece of History.
Jacqueline Mesmaeker’s exhibition took place at Keijiban from March 15 to April 14, 2024.