Exploration serves as the fundamental impetus behind artistic creation—employing the tools of art while maintaining a deliberate distance from both the (self-)artist and the artwork. This approach is intertwined with fragmentation, a series of distinct perspectives that observe and document the creative processes and their assimilation into the surrounding context.
Jan-Hendrik Pelz (*1984, Filderstadt, Germany), also known by the artistic pseudonym Paula Pelz, lives and works in Stuttgart. His practice encompasses painting, installation, conceptual art, and video. At the center of his work lies an interest in images as cultural constructions - their production, circulation, and the shifting meanings they acquire over time. Pelz frequently works with found imagery, historical references, and existing visual systems, which he investigates through strategies of appropriation, displacement, and recontextualization.
These concerns converge in the series [GESAMT] (2025–2026). The works originate from reproductions of artworks held in the collection [gesamtkunstwerk], which the artist cuts apart, recombines, and first transforms into collages before translating them into oil paintings. The series draws on the legacy of appropriation while engaging with processes of fragmentation and montage that have played a central role in twentieth-century art. By dismantling original image structures and reassembling them into new constellations, Pelz relocates questions of authorship and originality within a contemporary painterly practice. Individual motifs remain recognizable as citations, yet become detached from their original contexts and enter into new relationships. The collection itself is not represented as a subject; rather, it becomes the material of an artistic process of transformation.
From 2007 to 2015, Pelz studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart under Professor Christian Jankowski and Dr. Anne Vieth. In 2011, he completed an Erasmus scholarship at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Basel. In 2018, he was awarded the title of Meisterschüler as part of the Weißenhof Program.
His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including New York, Bogotá, London, and as part of the Istanbul Biennial. In 2022, his project An Inner Place was presented at Kassel’s RuruHaus during documenta fifteen. Most recently, Pelz has been featured alongside Delschad Numan Khorschid in the exhibition Zehn Leben at the Museum Villa Stuck.
Pelz has received several grants and awards, including funding from the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg. In 2020, he was awarded the 16th Art Prize of the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken. He is a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund e.V..