Jan-Hendrik Pelz [GESAMT]

What does the whole mean in a time when images are constantly fragmented, shared, reproduced, and reassembled?

 

The exhibition [GESAMT] explores this question - not as an answer, but as a proposition.

 

For this body of work, Jan-Hendrik Pelz works with reproductions of artworks from the [gesamtkunstwerk] collection. He cuts them apart, dissolves their original contexts, and recombines fragments from different works into new visual constellations. From these collages emerge 14 oil paintings, including a monumental triptych.

 

The paintings reveal not only their subjects but also the conditions of their making. Tears, overlaps, and dislocations remain visible. What has been separated is brought together again. What once appeared as a unified image breaks into fragments. And what has been fragmented acquires a new form of coherence.

 

Pelz thus operates within a field of tension that has shaped art throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: between appropriation and authorship, archive and present, memory and re-production. Yet unlike many strategies of image appropriation, his practice does not draw from an anonymous stream of images, but from a specific collection-a pre-existing network of works, perspectives, and histories.

 

The exhibition approaches the collection not as a repository of the past, but as material for new connections. Each painting exists both independently and in relation to others. Individual authorships remain visible while simultaneously becoming part of a larger framework.

 

In this sense, [GESAMT] becomes a reflection on the possibility of wholeness under the conditions of fragmentation. The title does not describe a fixed state. It names a process: the continuous renegotiation of relationships between images, meanings, and histories.

 

In a contemporary culture increasingly defined by montage, remix, and recontextualization, the whole no longer appears as an origin. It emerges through the connection of its parts.