guest of honour

Born in 1988 in San Francisco, USA, Elizabeth Jaeger lives and works in New York.

Elizabeth Jaeger’s dissonant yet poetic sculptures inhabit the space in between ontological categories - her subtle visual inflections resist definition and embrace the rich mystery and murkiness of our shared reality.

The artist says: “My working process is to take logic to its illogical conclusion, or a rationale to its irrational end.”

The artist has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions including prey at Mennour, Paris; yours truly at Museum Moirsbroich, Leverkusen ; Licking the Walls at Callie’s, Berlin; Persona and Parasite at White Space, Beijing; How To Survive at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Mirror Cells at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Greater New York at MoMA PS1; In Practice: Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New at Sculpture Center, New York; 99 Cents or Less at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and Zombies: Pay Attention! at the Aspen Art Museum.

Elizabeth Jaeger has chosen to take possession of the site and transcend it, installing a few simple, docile anthropomorphic sculptures, modelled in black clay and enhanced with bronze highlights — a flora and fauna that play with scale and time. It feels somewhat like an adult fairy tale, a bedtime story of sorts, unless it reflects an urgent need to awaken our consciences, to sound the alarm and finally wake up.

Perhaps here, in the singular setting of a fair, this urgency is even more palpable, and the system of compartmentalisation and confinement specially designed by the artist serves only to clarify the discourse and hasten action. Undoubtedly, this intentional distancing acts as a signal in this entrance — a place of passage entrusted to the artist to occupy, like a carefully crafted invitation for us to pause and shift our gaze.

The question of our belonging to the living world remains more pressing than ever, and to paraphrase Jean-Christophe Bailly in Versant animal, we must acknowledge that if “animals witness the world, we witness it with them, and at the same time as them.” It is this time that Elizabeth Jaeger seeks to address, in her own way, with or in spite of us—a time that is resolutely ageless.

Jean-Marc Dimanche

ceramic brussels 2025 © Geoffrey Fritsch

© Elizabeth Jaeger, Photo. Archives Mennour - Courtesy of the artist and Mennour, Paris