Frie J. Jacobs is a Belgian visual artist. His credits include exhibiting at The 1st Feminnale of Contemporary Art at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Kyrgyzstan, the Art Festival Watou in Belgium, and the Brussels International Underground Poetry Festival at Wiels. Along with participation in numerous group and solo art shows, he co-curated Project O and Foundation F, a roofless independent art project. 

Jacobs is an interdisciplinary artist. His oeuvre includes painting, drawings, three-dimensional and digital works, in-situ interventions, visual music scores, handmade artist’s books,… He uses almost everything found in nature for this: plants, seeds, flowers, roots, a mushroom, charcoal, beeswax , rain, fire, … but also acrylic and oil paint, photography, video.

Jacobs also creates soundscapes for videos from mainly foreign artists, and I work together with others on various projects (including Urban Dialogues, a collaboration of ten artists from Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, India, Japan, New York, Nigeria, Spain and Belgium).

He is the first prize winner of the Slovak Press Photo Strangers in Motion, a collaboration with the Czech photographer and video maker Jana Hunterova, and is a member of the international artist collective, Urban Dialogues, with whom he made the exhibition Encontro de Rios in Lisbon in 2018.

‘Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way – the way of art – for the sake of just such turn’, the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan, who drowned himself in the Seine in 1970, wrote. I have chosen to start my contribution on the work of the artist Frie J. Jacobs with a few verses of this German-language poet as Frie J. Jacobs’s entire body of work can be summarised as a subtle ‘Turning of our Breath’. He famously said that ‘Art is like Breathing…

Title: Stiltenisse

Introduction: Inge Braeckman

Other text: Jelle Dierickx

Graphic design: Pieter Geerts

Publisher: Foundation F

2022 – English/Dutch – hardcover – full color – 96 pages – 25×19,5cm

ISBN 9789464518498

‘Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way – the way of art – for the sake of just such turn.’ (Poëzie is misschien dit: een Ademkeer, een wenteling van onze adem. Wie weet gaat poëzie misschien gewoon deze weg – de weg van de kunst – omwille van zo’n wending), stelde de in Roemenië geboren dichter Paul Celan die in 1970 een einde aan zijn leven maakte. Ik wil graag mijn tekst over het werk van de kunstenaar Frie J. Jacobs beginnen met deze Duitstalige dichter aangezien het hele oeuvre van Frie J. Jacobs als een subtiele ‘Ademkeer’, een zachte wenteling van een ademstoot kan worden beschouwd…

Title: Stiltenisse

Introduction: Inge Braeckman

Other text: Jelle Dierickx

Graphic design: Pieter Geerts

Publisher: Foundation F

2022 – English/Dutch – hardcover – full color – 96 pages – 25×19,5cm

ISBN 9789464518498