[GESAMT] is the title of Jan-Hendrik Pelz's solo exhibition and the latest series of works inspired by the [gesamtkunstwerk] collection.
Beginning with reproductions drawn from the collection, Pelz tears, recombines, and reconfigures existing works into collages that serve as the basis for large-scale oil paintings. Traces of these interventions - rupture, displacement, overlap - remain embedded within the finished images.
The series engages the histories of appropriation and fragmentation that have shaped artistic production since the twentieth century. Yet rather than treating destruction as an end point, Pelz approaches reconstruction as a generative act. Images are dismantled only to be assembled anew.
Working with a specific collection rather than a generalized image archive, the paintings bring distinct artistic positions into direct relation. Familiar motifs persist as citations while assuming new meanings within altered contexts. Authorship is neither fixed nor dissolved, but redistributed across the surface of the work. The titles, which identify the artists whose works are incorporated into each composition, function less as attributions than as an index of the relationships that structure the paintings.
The exhibition's title, [GESAMT], proposes neither completeness nor resolution. Instead, it points to a condition of assembly: a whole produced through the encounter of fragments, histories, and authorships. If the collection serves as the material foundation of the work, it also becomes its subject - not as something represented, but as something continually reorganized. In Pelz's paintings, the Gesamtkunstwerk is no longer conceived as a unified artistic ideal, but as an open process of construction, in which coherence emerges through difference rather than despite it.
