Jacqueline Mesmaeker
Secret Outlines

The Generali Foundation is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to the extraordinary work of Belgian artist Jacqueline Mesmaeker (1929 Uccle, BE—2023 Brussels, BE). The exhibition presents a selection of key works by the artist from the five decades of her career from 1974 to 2023.

Mesmaeker's work defies simple categorization. Almost effortlessly, her output interweaves widely diverse media and methods: they intertwine image, language, and space; film, photography, and drawing; sculpture, readymade, and intervention. Mesmaeker’s art also opens new doors for works of literature, transposes the painterly register into film and film into three dimensions, and works with found objects and materials to unleash their narrative power. In art-historical terms, her oeuvre may be categorized as a blend of post-minimalism and post-conceptualism with the Belgian traditions of Symbolism and Surrealism.

Mesmaeker was particularly interested in the mechanisms of poetry, imagination and association, which she explores conceptually. Her works are full of visual mysteries. It seems as if the artist is laying traces and hints as to hidden and secret stories that need to be discovered. She plays with our imagination, using suggestive images and texts, and she seems to take great pleasure in challenging our powers of perception and our intellect. The lightness of her works is underpinned by a highly sensitive awareness of existential processes—of remembering and forgetting, of destiny, and of visibility and invisibility, also with reference to the stories of women.

Jacqueline Mesmaeker was highly respected in the Belgian art scene throughout her life and taught at renowned universities for many years. At the same time, she worked in deliberate seclusion into old age. The exhibition Secret Outlines is the first retrospective of Jacqueline Mesmaeker's work outside Belgium and is therefore an important milestone in the international reassessment of her oeuvre.

A comprehensive publication was published on the occasion of the exhibition, which presents Mesmaeker's work in detail with essays by international authors and rich visual material.