Jacqueline Peeters
Unsold Paintings (a contemporary picture gallery)
The artist Jacqueline Peeters (Eindhoven, 1961) presents a selection of her pictorial works set up like a typical 17th century paintings collections, namely covering the walls up to the ceiling and arranged by colour combinations and dimensions, rather than chronological order. The exhibition is a journey into the artist’s imagination and intimate world. Her paintings, in which words play a central role, can be regarded as an open criticism of the art system but above all they express the artist’s inability to become part of it: an artist without an audience must shout, self-promote, plan exhibitions and invite the right people. This “scream” of frustration is transformed into a creative drive and becomes the theme of the artist’s research itself, developing a pictorial meta-discourse.
Jacqueline Peeters creates an imaginary exhibition through her works by painting on canvas titles and information such as dimensions, dates, technique and prices. She states: «I grew up in Eindhoven where I often visited the Van Abbemuseum. One of my favourite paintings from the museum’s collection has always been Max Beckmann’s Winterbild. It is a window on the world but it is also a world in itself, contained within the borders of the canvas. And perhaps it also literally is a window on the world, a grid laid over the world in order to get a grip on it. I love to break out of the window now and again and go on a conceptual excursion. I paint price lists of my drawings, make my own ‘fictitious exhibition’ posters or compile a catalogue of my ‘Unsold Paintings’. After all, one has to meet the law of supply and demand»
Amongst the works exhibited in Zazà Ramen’s paintings collection, “Mlle Matisse Est Nue” is inspired by a painting by the French artist of a woman sitting on a balcony and wearing a coat. Peeters depicts the same piece of clothing, leaving the viewer to imagine the woman on the balcony left naked without her coat. Another work is “Broembroem”, which with its onomatopoeic title evokes the idea of a repeated journey, the one that the artist takes every day in her car on the same road: the car decelerates, stops, accelerates; it is sound, rhythm and direction.
Decorated with paintings by Jacqueline Peeters, Zazà Ramen’s walls welcome art as a part of our everyday life, with an enjoyment and exposure more similar to our homes than to museum rooms.
Jacqueline Peeters was born in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) in 1961 and lives and works in Geraardsbergen (Belgium). Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Tilburg (The Netherlands), she attended de Ateliers in Haarlem (The Netherlands) and received the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 1987. Since the late 1980s she has exhibited in group exhibitions in Dutch institutions including the Paleis op de Dam, the Museum Fodor, the Van Abbemuseum and others. In the 1990s she presented her work in selected solo exhibitions in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium and since 2000 she has worked as a media analyst, drafting reputation risk reports for important international companies and institutions.