PROJECTS

Plein Soleil
In Plein Soleil, Backhaus explores the photographic possibilities of abstraction.  She presents a stunning visual symphony where the compositional interplay of color, surface, and form reigns supreme. The images, using a complex visual language, are even more radical and uncompromising than those in the previous project. Through minimalist compilations of reality’s set pieces, she crafts works that transcend the ordinary, transporting viewers into vibrant, luminous worlds full of life energy.
Indications of the Sea is a project with works shot mainly in black and white, showing unspectacular moments, details and situations near the sea.
„Learn to see and to feel life, that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be.“
Josef Albers
With The Nature of Things, Jessica Backhaus draws our attention to the small things and subtle details, which, according to the artist, often have a deeper meaning and can reveal a lot about the whole picture. By emphasizing the beauty in simple objects, she employs a poetic interplay of light, color, and shadow.

„Up to now, painting was like photography in color.
But color was always employed as a means to describe something. Abstract art is the premise of a liberation from the old pictorial formula. A genuinely new form of painting will emerge the day we understand that color has a life of its own, that the endless combinations of colors bear poetry and a poetic language way more expressive than the older forms. This mysterious language has to do with vibrations, the very life of a color. In this domain, new possibilities areinfinite.“
Sonia Delaunay, 1949

„Wer nicht denken will fliegt raus“ (Who is unwilling to think is dismissed) Joseph Beuys, 1977
„I was inspired by this quote from Joseph Beuys during my confinement in Berlin. I felt it very relevant during this particular time. This series was created during the first lockdown in collaboration with the curator Diana Poole in the spring of 2020. This global crisis is challenging us. Everywhere we are forced to adapt to this unprecedented situation. I have been using this time of stillness to experiment with various new series. Some of the works in this series were directly inspired by some of the works Beuys did; the Capri Battery, 1985, Das Erdtelefon, 1967 and the Fat chair, 1963. For me it was also a moment
of pause and reflection.“
Jessica Backhaus

„Presence, image, and suggestion: art’s sacred trinity is embodied with such generous concentration in these images by Jessica Backhaus, who we as Chileans should thank for making so exquisitely visible, what we are too distracted to notice. The power of the color that portrays and crowns the subject, provokes the sensation that we are seeing something we see every day but haven’t actually seen before.“
Antonio Skarmeta

Jessica Backhaus embarkso n her work with an obvious relish in experimentation. The artist’s new
trilogy brings togethert hrees erieso f approximately 40 works each. The first series. Beyond Blue is
devoted completely to colorful threads, staged against colored backgrounds. In Shifting Clouds,
Jessica Backhaus considers and documents a reality that lies in between things. She shows
fragments and visions that are poised on the verge of becoming. In the third series, New Horizon the
artist is breaking new ground in photography. incorporating components of mixed media, painting, and
collage that expand and deepen her work.

Beyond Blue

Jessica Backhaus examines, with her latest photographic series Six degrees of freedom. universal themes of origin, yearning, identity, and destiny. Based on her own life story she inquires after the significance of knowing the roots of one’s own existence and to what extent it is possible to re-elaborate these – usually prescribed – roots.

Sometimes it takes time to grasp the work of an artist. How often does the attention-grabbing motif stand at the foreground. For Jessica Backhaus, the motif provides an occasion for contemplating the „way of the world;“ the „order of things“ (which disorder makes necessary), for thinking about light and color as generators of life. And there is something else as well, a quiet melancholy that tells us that we cannot change the tides. In other words: that we should follow them instead.
Jean-Christophe Ammann

Our experiences in life, our education and the people who are in our lives, are the essence of who we become. We grow, we change, we evolve and hopefully keep growing and staying alive in every possible way.
It was Thursday, the 5th of November 1992. I had no idea that on this particular day I would meet the
legendary photographer Gisele Freund and that this one day would have such an impact on my life …… .
Jessica Backhaus

„Turning points. in-between states, a beautiful kind of limbo that tugs at the heart and suggests stories of loss and remembrance. That is what photographs are, after all, memorials that stop time and hold it for a moment. for our contemplation. If Backhaus·s photographs are partly memorials to lost combs and half-eaten apples, they surely allude, as well, to other things that have been lost along the way.“
Jean Dykstra

Jessica Backhaus‘ fascination is not with the nostalgic objects, but instead with this experience of vanishing and slipping away. Occasionally, the photographer finds metaphors for this process, such as when the peeling blue paint on the walls of a house comes into view like the map of an unknown continent, or when she shows us fleeting clouds in the blue of the water’s surface. This attunement to loss and disappearance continually erodes the idyll that Backhaus tries to depict. The hidden tension between present and past, between beauty and transience, 1s what gives Jesus and the Cherries its special quality.“ …
Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen