The exhibition includes paintings, prints and works on paper. In her Pollution Painting series, Jager makes visible the invisible combustion and sediment that defines the city's landscape. Playing off L.A.'s varied reputation for car culture, inevitable sunshine, and smog-induced sunsets, Jager placed canvases in the outdoors and retrieved them a month later as readymade landscape paintings.
François Ghebaly is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of works by Marie Jager at
Kunsthalle, Los Angeles. The exhibition will include paintings, prints and works on paper.
In her Pollution Painting series, Marie Jager makes visible the invisible combustion and sediment
that defines the city’s landscape. Playing off L.A.’s varied reputation for car culture, inevitable
sunshine, and smog-induced sunsets, Jager placed canvases in the outdoors and retrieved them
a month later as readymade landscape paintings.
The delicate abstractions that result invert the
en plein air of one of painting’s longstanding conventional modes. In contrast to these durational
portraits of the urban environment, the instant of ignition that defines everyday life in Los
Angeles—turning over the engine in your car—is captured repeatedly in Jager’s Starter paintings
where the burnt oil discharged when the motor engages makes an instant oil-on-canvas
landscape of the city’s mobility and automobile reliant citizenry.
Marie Jager’s works from the Heat series (2009) are blueprinted aerial views of the city of Los
Angeles, which through various masking techniques, she has partially exposed to the sun’s
damaging rays during heat waves. Blueprinting is a process similar to the cyanotype process
invented by British astronomer John Herschel. By Jager’s intervention, she pushes the
photosensitivity further, and offering the prints to the long exposure of the city’s elements, she
pushes them to a point of discoloration that evokes the blinding effect of the sun. While the Heat
series result in a hallow of light entering the picture, the series titled Rain turns aerial views of the
city into giant watercolors, recording various patterns of rain and resulting in different levels of
abstraction.
Marie Jager has exhibited internationally, a selection of venues includes Artist’s Space and
Sculpture Center, New York; MakCenter for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Henry Art Gallery,
Seattle; China Arts Object, Los Angeles; Croy Nielsen gallery, Berlin. She was included in the
California Biennial 2006. Jager’s work is in several private collections in Europe and the US. She
lives and works in Los Angeles.
For more information, please contact Kunsthalle L.A. at kunsthalleLA@gmail.com
or Francois Ghebaly at francois@ghebaly.com
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 1, 2010 5-9 PM
Kunsthalle L.A.
932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012
New Hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12pm - 6pm