JESSICA BACKHAUS. SHADOWS MIGHT DANCE

Form, colour, and light shape the visual cosmos of internationally acclaimed German photographer Jessica Backhaus. Rooted in documentary photography, her work expands this tradition through a lyrical and highly personal visual language. Small details draw her attention, opening pathways to the enigmatic and to new ways of seeing. Through intuitive, experimental processes, she explores emotional themes such as vitality, absence, and memory. Her images reveal a refined sensitivity to materiality, texture, and the subtlest inflections of colour that unfold in the fertile space between photography, painting, and object-based art.

This exhibition brings together works from the past twenty-five years—from early documentary works to her gradual shift toward abstraction and her new series “Papyrus,” presented here for the first time—offering a wide-ranging insight into her artistic oeuvre.

»Jessica Backhaus. Shadows might Dance« is curated by Andrea Horvay and Celina Lunsford in close cooperation with the artist.

Jessica Backhaus, born in 1970 in Cuxhaven, comes from an artistic family. At the age of sixteen she moved to Paris, where she later studied photography and visual communication. In 1995 her passion for photography led her to New York, where she worked as an assistant to various photographers, pursuing her own projects, and lived until 2009. Today, Jessica Backhaus is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary photography in Germany. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. Her photographs are held in a wide range of national and international museums and private collections, including the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.