German artist
Born in Düsseldorf 1956
Lives and works in Cologne

What is the difference between seeing a horse in a paddock, a stuffed horse as a part of a museum display, a very realistic papier maché horse in a saddler shop, a photo of a horse in a magazine or a painting of a horse?

Only in the first case we see the real thing.
The stuffed one and the papier maché one are “installations”, three dimensional arrangements. But the stuffed one has still some element of reality, the skin of the animal. The papier maché one is a pure representation.

The photo and the painting are simply illusions, two dimensional, flat representations of an animal.

And yet when asked what we see almost everybody will say: “A horse”.

Now consider a room with painted walls, and in there a picture, painted on top of a photo, painted on top of a box, or on top of …canvas.
Actually we see these situations continually without noticing the differences in their “reality”.

Michael Jäger’s work invites us to explore these and similar situations and to enjoy discovering not only the subtle differences but also the esthetics of the unsuspected contrasts.

In his prints he was necessarily limited to the flat field and the restricted size of the paper, but he could play on physical changes in the structure of the surface by layering inks.

When the paper is already saturated by ink or covered with a metallic coat the aspect of the next layer of ink changes dramatically.
Doing so Michael not only creates a multi color print but also an object, a thing which will influence the perception of the room or the “installation” in which we find it.