We are very pleased to announce the second solo exhibition of the Austrian artist Peter Jellitsch in our gallery in Vienna. Under the title "Patents and Palm Trees", twelve new works on paper and a mural are presented showing the confrontation between digital and analogue reality.
In the exhibition "Patents and Palm Trees", Peter Jellitsch picks up on a topic he has been intensively researching for three years and to which he has dedicated more than 100 drawings, sculptures, photographs and installations: The visualization of the invisible areas of our digital world.
In a total of twelve drawings and a wall installation, we nd the conjunction and networking of inaccessible data streams with concrete, real elements that are related to each other. These "data drawings" can be understood as an awareness of digital reality and analogous illusion, in which our learned perception gets lost or redefined.
Palm trees and patents are related not only in Jellitsch's works but also in everyday life and in reality. In US cities, palm tree imitations contain hidden cell towers and their respective manifestations must comply with strict legal guidelines.
The artistic practice of Peter Jellitsch originates between the poles of the continuous spatial and invisible presence of information and data streams. In doing so, the artist measures the surrounding ping, download and upload rates via an app and writes them down in numerical diaries. This information is then transferred to drawings. As a result, digital and physical typographies of different places like Los Angeles, New York or Paris are generated, but their legibility is abstracted.
The machine generated and analogue translations are similar in size to the familiar formats of devices such as the iPhone, iPad or laptop. Behind Jellitsch's sketches occasionally hidden guration emerges: "males", which we also know from explanatory patterns for operating instructions or alike, similar to a modern version of a back gure of Caspar David Friedrich.
The works of Peter Jellitsch could be seen as a digital interpretation of classical landscapes. Without romance, but with an artistic routine that is committed to the realism of our long-standing digital revolution. Peter Jellitsch was born in 1982 in Villach, Austria. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
His works have been shown in numerous exhibitions in the US and Europe and are represented in the collections of well-known museums such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of Modern Art Carinthia (MMKK) and the Graphic Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts Arts, Vienna. Jellitsch is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, i.a. Strabag Artaward (2014), Theodor Körner Prize (2014), the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Scholarship (2013) and the Outstanding Artist Award of the Republic of Austria (2010). He has received the CCA Andratx AiR (2017), the MAK-Schindler Scholarship, Los Angeles (2014), as well as fellowships associated with Artist Residencies at Montpellier (2014), Paris (2014) and New York (2011).
Since 2011 Peter Jellitsch teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.