The thirty-five framed photographs in this debut solo exhibition were small and pale, with subjects that don’t reveal anything spectacular—and yet the works of Margarete Jakschik, a Polish-born artist who has lived in Germany since 1980, when she was six years old, fascinate at first sight. Jakschik completed her studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf two years ago under the tutelage of Thomas Ruff, but little connection is made here to his artistic process. Indeed, Jakschik’s photographs are rather the opposite of Ruff’s: subjective, intimate, contingent, passionate—even romantic.

For years