Elizabeth Jaeger “Pommel”

Jack Hanley

This event has ended.

A pommel is the upward curving or projecting part of a saddle in front of the rider; a pommel horse is a vaulting apparatus used for a gymnastic exercise consisting of swings of the legs and body. Tools to be ridden.

In the artist’s second solo show at the gallery, Elizabeth Jaeger presents a series of truncated reclining nudes. This new set of work confronts the “traditional” elegance and fragility of female form with a subtle violence: the torsos are sheared, immobilized, and propped on steel. The ceramic sculptures are active conflations, just as they are stark reductions, of various modes of seeing and forming the body – as object, as tool, as desire, as servant – multiple meanings across indistinguishable forms. Through tactics of reduction, replication and an acute awareness of display, the artist offers a unique vision of classical form suffused with the violence of mass reproduction, questioning and reconfiguring Modernist methodology.

Jaeger’s unglazed ceramic sculptures present subtle variation across hollow torsos, draped on custom-built steel display stands. Here we have an abstraction of a ubiquitous form repeated many times over. The romanticism is dispelled with. These rigid, fragile forms transform the figure into something else entirely, an un-individuated body, a set, a display, a theater, or a factory.

Concurrent with the exhibition, the artist has produced a series of 75 drawings, hand-altered digital pigment prints of classical paintings. Included in the set are various Reclining Nudes, Odalisques, Venuses, Lenas and Nymphs, whose compositions echo one another as copy. Each is drawn over with black colored pencil, both obfuscating and transforming the original works in equal measure. These drawings are collated into an available publication titled, “Denude”. This collection of images operates as per definition of the title, stripped of context, made bare, and organized into a loose flipbook of an empty rolling torso.

To pummel is to strike repeatedly, typically with the fists.

Elizabeth Jaeger lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Six-Thirty at Jack Hanley Gallery, Elizabeth Jaeger at And Now in Dallas, and Music Stand at Eli Ping, New York. This year the artist has participated in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, Sculpture Center’s In Practice: Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New and Mirror Cells at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Most recently, the artist participated in It Started With A Rose at 315 Gallery, New York, Idle Visitation at Plaza Mercado, Santa Fe, Too Much of a Good Thing at Hudson Basilica, Hudson, New York, Summer Reading at Fortnight Institute, New York, as well as Watermark at SIGNAL, New York, Fear of a Blank Pancake at White Flag Projects, St Louis, Weird Science curated by Aniko Berman at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, Le Musée Imaginaire at Galerie Lefebvre & Fils, Paris, Close to the Skin curated by Lumi Tan at Company, New York and Dirty Linen at the DESTE Foundation in Athens. The artist has also participated in Elizabeth Jaeger at KINMAN, London, Got Tortilla with Butter on Phone. Think it’s the End? curated by Mikkel Carl at Rod Barton, London and Border Patrol curated by Jesse Greenberg at Loyal in Malmo, Sweden.

Jaeger has exhibited across America and internationally. Published works include Ships in the Night (Peradam 2016), Eros C’Est La Vie (Totem, 2013) and How Other People See Me (Publication Studio, 2011). Additionally, Jaeger co-founded and operates Peradam with Sam Cate-Gumpert, a publishing house specializing in artists’ books.