PRESS RELEASE

Stalke Gallery invites you to exhibitions with

Peter Røssell and Jeannette Ehlers

It is with great pleasure that Stalke Gallery opens its doors for Peter Røssell’s first solo gallery exhibition in two years. The exhibition features a series of new works that showcase significant aspects of Røssell’s artistic development in recent years.

Peter Røssell’s new works function as fragmented mirrors that break, encrypt, and reassemble, while still reflecting a recognizable outer reality. In the works, everyday icons are juxtaposed in a way that mirrors the optical barrage experienced in modern life—whether flipping through countless TV channels, navigating the big city, flipping through a magazine, or surfing the vast cyberspace. The optical and conceptual chaos in these new works resonates with our experiences and feels unsettlingly familiar. These pressing and alarming works reflect Peter Røssell's exploration of the visual and informational bombardment in modern life.

Røssell’s seemingly chaotic montage of patterns, text, photorealism, graffiti, and fleeting yet accessible visual forms give his work a resolutely expressive quality. The canvases appear as snapshots elevated from the urban landscape, where various generations’ markings and "tagging" are visible at the same time. Discarded images are salvaged, connected, and reevaluated. The irrational combination of elements may not be explained but should instead be seen as the result of deliberate decisions in the studio to fabricate a simulacrum of contemporary and cosmopolitan visual chaos.

In the Project Room, Jeannette Ehlers’ works are featured. Over recent years, Jeannette Ehlers has focused on the digital image and its potential through computer-manipulated videos—more specifically, "found footage" that she processes "frame by frame." Like a surgeon, she makes simple yet significant interventions into the chosen material: removing, rearranging, shifting focus, and thereby creating an entirely new expression compared to the original. She tackles already-existing material and employs destruction as an essential tool in her work. Jeannette Ehlers thus examines how one can intervene in the visual surface, enter the realm of meaning, and how the result of these interventions contributes to an understanding of contemporary life.