PELES DUO x PETER JACOBI

For the exhibition Peles Duo x Peter Jacobi, Peles Duo (Barbara Wolff, b. 1980 Făgăraș, and Katharina Stoever, b. 1982 Giessen) have invited Peter Jacobi (b. 1935 Ploiești) to show alongside them at SUPRAINFINIT. Peles Duo will show new paintings and Peter Jacobi will show two sculptures from 1976-77 and 2016-17. The artist duo have made a wallpaper incorporating images of sculptures by Peter Jacobi and the duo that acts as both a backdrop and a bridge between the two artists’ practices.

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Hands, which for these artists come in a pair of hands and a pair of pair of hands, are both a subject and an actor in the work of Peter Jacobi and Peles Duo. Peles Duo have begun painting again, a discipline they both studied before the collaboration but have only fleetingly explored since. To work with four hands on one painting, and in this instance very small paintings, is to share an extremely personal space both in thought and dextrous decision. That recurrent motifs in these paintings come from sculpture, most visibly the Phrygian mother goddess Cybele, is consistent with a practice that has always sought to translate one medium into another, existing work into new work, energy into object. The layering of image, colour and surface in the paintings (whose technique is not limited to the brush but also includes marbled Jesmonite and UV print) creates a palimpsest in which a reference or an idea can become visible without ever becoming dominant. They reward looking, and also looking away, as they yield more upon return.

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Peter Jacobi’s Moving Female Hands on a Female Body (1976-77) is a work in marble that recalls both the medium’s virtuoso highpoint in Bernini’s sculptures and a Modernist ambition to capture movement in an image. Its title, which is in itself remarkable, and the hardness of marble, are an instruction (years ahead of contemporary debate) to challenge our preconceptions of how hands and work and bodies codify themselves. La Kahlo endormie (2016-17) works with an (art-)historical past, reuniting elements of his own earlier work to form a new assemblage that both advances and revisits his own work. It is a strategy often employed too by Peles Duo (formerly Peles Empire), who repeatedly use their own work as material. This common approach links the artists across the different times and geographies in which they have worked.

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Fluidity, as a reciprocal of viscosity, can vary. Glass, famously, is a liquid. The various materials used in this exhibition have gone through a process of hardening, from the rapid curing of UV ink to the geological formation of marble, but in so doing the ideas that encouraged their use have become looser, ever shifting, and the images they depict more malleable and more complicated than before. Myth, hands, bodies – still ungraspable.

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–  Oliver Osborne, July 2023

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Exhibition views by Alexandru Paul

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This project is financed with the support of EEA Grants 2014-2021 within the RO-CULTURE Program.

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