"Deconstructing Marie-Thérèse" Painting

Peter Vahlefeld explores how advertising and branding shape the way we perceive visual culture. His paintings emerge through a meticulous and layered process that combines traditional painting with digital printing. Matte and glossy surfaces interact with acrylics, watercolor, oil paint, pigments, fabrics, prints, and translucent varnishes, resulting in works of striking depth, texture, and complexity. Materials have their own souls—their own chemical properties, gravities, and past lives. Immersion in the process of making is therefore essential, and involves layering, overpainting, erasing and reconstructing the image through physical and digital means. The texture of his paintings is dynamic, with areas of thick impasto of oil paint juxtaposed against flat printed sections that challenge the boundaries between abstraction and representation. He is acting like a narrator to create a dialogue between traditional painting and contemporary media culture—like a game that consists of changing the code. By reinterpreting motifs from marketing campaigns for museums, galleries, auction houses, and museum gift shops, he transforms commercial objects back into art. This conceptual depth, combined with expressive, layered compositions, makes his paintings particularly strong! After graduating from Parsons School of Design (1990), he had a number of solo/group exhibitions in NYC, at Ward Nasse Gallery (1991), White Columns (1991), Society of Illustrators (American Illustration, Yearbook 1991), Barney´s (1992), Visual Miracles (1992), and was doing illustrations for »Spin Magazine« and »The New School for Social Research«. After relocating to Berlin from New York, his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries, art fairs, and venues such as Neumeister Fine Art Auctioneers (Munich), Sotheby's (Vienna), Fritz Hansen (Denmark), Allianz Art Collection and Poliform Interior Design. His work can be found in private and corporate collections throughout Europe, the United States and East Asia. Peter Vahlefeld was featured on the German television channel ZDF, and currently has a studio in Berlin and Munich.