Peter Rösssell

Stalke Galleri invited audiences to exhibitions with Peter Rössell and Jeannette Ehlers at Stalke Galleri.

It was with great pleasure that Stalke Galleri opened its doors to Peter Rössell’s first solo gallery exhibition in two years. The exhibition at Stalke Galleri presented a series of new works that showcased significant aspects of Røssell’s artistic development in recent years.

Peter Rössell’s new works functioned as fragmented mirrors that broke, encrypted, and reassembled visual information while still reflecting a recognizable outer reality. In these works, everyday icons were juxtaposed in ways that mirrored the optical barrage experienced in modern life—whether flipping through countless TV channels, navigating the big city, browsing magazines, or surfing the vast cyberspace. The optical and conceptual chaos of the works resonated with contemporary experience and appeared unsettlingly familiar. These pressing and alarming works reflected Peter Rössell’s exploration of the visual and informational bombardment characteristic of modern life.

Rössell’s seemingly chaotic montage of patterns, text, photorealism, graffiti, and fleeting yet accessible visual forms gave his work a resolutely expressive quality. The canvases appeared as snapshots elevated from the urban landscape, where markings and “tagging” from various generations were visible simultaneously. Discarded images were salvaged, connected, and re-evaluated. The irrational combinations of elements were not intended to be explained but rather understood as the result of deliberate decisions in the studio to fabricate a simulacrum of contemporary and cosmopolitan visual chaos.

In the Project Room at Stalke Galleri, works by Jeannette Ehlers were presented. This marked Jeannette Ehlers’ first exhibition at Stalke Galleri. In the years leading up to the exhibition, Ehlers had focused on the digital image and its potential through computer-manipulated video works—more specifically, “found footage” processed frame by frame. Like a surgeon, she made precise yet significant interventions into the chosen material by removing, rearranging, and shifting focus, thereby creating an entirely new expression in relation to the original. Her practice engaged with already existing material and employed destruction as an essential tool. Through this approach, Jeannette Ehlers examined how one might intervene in the visual surface, enter the realm of meaning, and how the results of such interventions contributed to an understanding of contemporary life.

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