Michelle Jezierski

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

My paintings ask how many spaces a single picture can hold at once. Both my parents are classical musicians, and I translate that background into visual terms: the works are built from repetition, echo and rupture, the way a piece of music is built from a theme, its variations and the rests between them. Geometry sets the structure. The lines and bands I weave through each canvas establish a rhythm, and the gestural marks, poured ink and flowing fields of colour work against it. My starting points are often landscape, sky, sea and the horizon line, alongside the geometries of the built environment, abstracted until foreground and background can no longer be told apart. The works embrace ambiguity and liminality, in composition as in subject: landscape-like spaces that put pressure on the picture plane and test what happens when geometric and gestural abstraction are made to meld. The geometric interferences often register as glitches. In Tip and Between the Lines, horizontal breaks cut through a skyscape of poured ink, like a print-out that has jammed halfway. This is close to how most of us now take in information: on screens, in layers, interrupted and refreshed before it has settled. Modular ceramics now take the work into three dimensions. Each unit has its own internal logic; arranged together, the units form constellations that change as the viewer walks around them. The move returns me to my studies with Tony Cragg at the Berlin University of the Arts, where...

Artwork