Peter Vahlefeld studied at the Parsons School of Design, New York, receiving an Honours degree in 1990. He has participated in many solo exhibitions and art fairs like art Karlsruhe, Germany on a regular basis or at auctions such as Sotheby’s in Vienna and Neumeister, Munich. His work was featured on German Television ZDF for a project on Robert Mapplethorpe and his works are held in collections across the world. Peter Vahlefeld currently lives and works in Berlin.
Peter Vahlefeld’s work explores the visible and veiled aspects of the dissemination of images. The paintings are both complex and multi-layered, emotive pictorial palimpsests regarding his use of superimposed sources, which carry an iconographic set of references. By painting lushly on top of them he expropriates their surface, language and semantics. Hijacking material from the public domain and obscuring them, Vahlefeld further complicates the everyday transaction of images by taking away the content they are supposed to advertise.
The whole social fabric of our society is used as a point of departure for abstraction and becomes reanimated and supercharged. All compositions venture into various configurations of spatial expression created by the superimposition of layers of paint and layers of prints—marks scanned, collaged, re-photographed, printed, and overpainted. The result is a work that occupies a space between painting and its digital double, leaving a picture plane marked by an effortlessly elegant dance of smudges, puddles and saturated strokes.
“I always love the way advertisements for museums and galleries or auction catalogue covers look. I love seeing them in museum shops or in international art magazines. I began to mark over the printed matter myself and distort the marketing campaigns with oil paint, changing the narratives. I adore the idea of turning them back into paintings, and that the printed matter can be touched and remade, unlike the original artworks”.
“I like being inside the printed matter, using the language as a relationship between signs and mixing commercial design, pop, appropriation and institutional critique. Juxtaposing two independently conceived surfaces like paint and prints and making no attempt to convincingly blend these different elements, the paintings are first and foremost the story of their own making”.
