AMSTERDAM.- From 29 June to 3 September 2023, works from Jacquie Maria Wessels' analogue photo series Garage Stills will be on show at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (NL) in the group exhibition New Horizons. Modern photography at the Rijksmuseum. The analogue photographs were recently acquired by the Rijksmuseum for the museum's photography collection. This summer’s New Horizons exhibition at the Rijksmuseum showcases highlights of modern colour photography.

For her Garage Stills project, Wessels is looking for traditional car repair garages all over the world. She is fascinated and intrigued by the shapes and colours of the mysterious, to her completely unknown objects she discovers in this wonderful universe. With the found attributes she creates painterly still lifes on the spot, which she captures with an analogue 6x6 camera. The poetic Garage Stills with challenging colour formations and staging surprise and have an attractive beauty, but are a document of a disappearing world as well.

Over the past few years the Rijksmuseum has been increasingly active collecting modern colour photography. This exhibition comprises 30 photographs by Dutch and foreign photographers such as Viviane Sassen, Michael Wolf, Pieter Hugo, Ruud van Empel van Jacquie Maria Wessels. Most of the exhibits were either gifted to the museum or purchased with the support of private funds, and are being shown for the first time.

New Horizons traces a critical transitional period in the history of photography. Until the 1970s, many photographers had no interest in working in colour: in 1961, the American photographer Robert Frank said ‘Black and white are the colours of photography.’ To many photographers, black and white was the standard. Sixty years on, the reverse is true, and colour has suffused all forms of photography. It’s difficult now to imagine it being any other way. The rise of colour photography led to the convergence of artistic and documentary practices, and the blurring of genre boundaries.

Jacquie Maria Wessels

Artist Jacquie Maria Wessels (NL) studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and social psychology at the Vrije Universiteit, both in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her autonomous work is related to documentary photography and is often the result of a long-term immersion in a well-defined subject.