JACQUELINE BACHMANN
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October 12-30, 2022
Jacqueline Bachmann’s mythic imagery that bespeaks of an animistic communion with the forces of nature will remind the viewer of Northop Frye’s famous paraphrasing of Mircea Eliade’s writings on myths. Frye notes that the central symbolism and the central conception of myths and rituals is that a renewal in time is normally thought of as a renewal of time
The recalling and the recapitulation of sacred places within sacred time which is captured in the artist’s lates paintings. Her work celebrates and heralds the imaginative patterns of the movements of natural forces. Her work, while its pantheistic aura might easily be traced back to the German Romantics’ deep empathy with nature and later to the Transcendentalist movement’s roots in American landscape painting, particularly the Hudson River School painters in the nineteenth century, harkens to a pre-Edenic sense of oneness with the environment. Bachmann’s images are evocations of the deep symbolism of life, disappearance and rebirth embedded within the cycles of nature.
Historically speaking there is a strong universal natural theology at work here, an animistic principle, that reminds the viewer of the elemental pictorial forms of the transcendental work of early modernist artists such as Arthur Dove, the strongly delineated imagery of Rockwell Kent, and artists from Canada’s Group of Seven such as Dorothy Carr, David Milne and Lawren S. Harris. Indeed, the strongly sculptural impulse in the Jacqueline Bachmann’s works make them immediately recognizable as well as intensely realized.
It is worth devoting a bit of time to look at the structurally sound pictorial strategy the artist employs throughout her work. She adroitly translates the essential shapes of trees, rocks and water strams into enigmatic paintings. Veins of color isolate and intensify detached lines and shapes and at the same time, become equivalents for light. Thus, her formal innovation offers us sensations of breathtaking views, vertiginous and strong flows of cascading water currents --- imagery that is simultaneously benign and awesome.
Through Bachmann’s compositional and shading expertise identifiable and localized place becomes transcendent space while historical and indexical time freezes and shifts into primordial and immemorial time. The artist’s works transmutes and transforms: the materiality of the world so fervently recorded becomes transubstantiated into the world of pure presence. Materiality becomes immateriality. The pictorial codes of mimesis and representation are re-presented through the lens of Friedrich von Schelling’s natur-philosophie. Through this ideological framework a deep coherence is seen as underlying all phenomena and Nature is the embodiment of an eternal Idea.
John Austin is an art critic living and working in Manhattan.
2023 Villa Dutoit, Geneva, Switzerland
2023 Gallery Bleu de Chine, Fleurier, Switzerland
2022 Artifact Gallery, New York, USA
2022 Kunsthandlung Pigmento Gallery, Luzern, Switzerland
2022 Library Julien, Geneva, Switzerland
2021 Artraction, Lausanne, Switzerland
2020 FATart Fair, Women in arts, Schaffhausen, Switzerland
2019 Art Gallery, Verbier, Switzerland
2019 Humanit’Art Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland
2019 Art is Gallery, Büren a.A., Switzerland
2018 Bise Möbel, les Automnales, Bulle + Tavel, Switzerland
2018 Bienal de Florence, Italie
2017 The Connoisseur’s Gallery, Paris, France
2016-14 Gallery Art’monie Geneva, Switzerland
2016 Mines d’art Gallery, Carouge/GE, Switzerland
2016 Cariou Fondation, Manosque, France
2015 Edouard Roch Gallery, Ballens, Switzerland
2014 Gallery art net.ch, Begnins, Switzerland
2013-09 Kunsthandlung Pigmento Gallery, Luzern, Switzerland
2012 Service Industriel (SIG), Geneva, Switzerland
2012 Plexus Gallery, Fribourg, Switzerland
2012-08 Gallery la Grange, Romainmôtier, Switzerland
2011 CarArt, Garage Emil Frey, Crissier, Switzerland
2011 Plexus Gallery, Montreux, Switzerland
2010 Gallery art net.ch, Begnins, Switzerland
2009 Brennwald & Partner Society, Zurich, Switzerland
2008 Restaurant Barocco, Art & History Museum, Geneva, Switzerland
2007 Gallery 2016, Hauterive / NE, Switzerland
2006 Gallery la Tour, Bulle, Switzerland
2005 Chapelle de la Visitation, Thonon les Bains, France
1987 Hotel Hilton, Khartoum, Sudan
1979 French Alliance, Florianopolis, Brazil
2022 Swiss Society Women Artist, Leuk Schloss, Leuk, Switzerland
2022 Swiss Society of Fine arts, Chapelle des Arts, Geneva, Switzerland
2020 Women’s talent, Maison de la Culture, Sciez, France
2017-07 Collective artists for the 150 & 160 years of Swiss Society of Fine arts, Geneva
2012 « Floralis », 4 artists in the Gallery la Grange, Romainmôtier, Switzerland
2011 « Rathania’s Arts Similis Casus » Rath Museum, Geneva, Switzerland
2006-04 Europ’Art, Collective of Swiss Society of Fine arts, Geneva, Switzerland
2005 « Les Paravents » Centre d’Art en l’Ile, Geneva, Switzerland
Agents representing Jacqueline Bachmann: Gabriella Affolter, president SSFA, Berne; Artraction Society, Geneva; Alix Martin
jacquelinebachmann.com
This catalog has been published in conjunction with the exhibition of artwork by Jacqueline Bachmann
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Copyright © 2022 Artifact
Copyright © 2022 Images: Jacqueline Bachmann Design: Artelligent Graphics