Peter Jellitsch

Peter Jellitsch walks the line between the real and the illusory, the true and the false. His paintings sketch themselves as palm forests, tropical trees that take our minds to the shores of the ocean, to the sea, with a mild sun warming our skin in joy. This is, at least, what’s what they do look like. In their apparent simplicity they conceal a study result of his Data Drawing, research concluded in 2018 with which he revolutionized the concept of topography by giving a new meaning to maps, no longer geographical but of internet searches, of people's needs, thus making visible, tangible and figurative, the most ephemeral yet so present and consistent element of our daily lives: data, our internet searches, our needs, our lives.

The interest in Jellitsch's stream of digital connections has slowly shifted to where these flows happen, how they are possible, how they happen, and to why, come to think of it, we do not see them. Invisible threads branch out around the entire planet allowing everyone to be able to access an Internet connection from any corner of the world.

Connections, connections and more connections to talk, share, update, move: live. So if these digital connections are so important to our daily lives, how is it possible that they are not perceived by the senses? They are hidden or, rather, we hide them. The palm trees in Los Angeles, the cactus in the Arizona desert as well as hundreds, thousands of other elements of nature collected in his publication "Palm Tree Antenna" are mirages, within their own foliage they guard transmitters, no longer needs, but the emblem of contemporary man's very dependence on digital connections, on feeling always and everywhere close, plural, shared. The need to make technology familiar, natural, ordinary has caused people to start not only hiding internet repeaters in the palm trees that decorate our city avenues, but also to build cactus in the middle of the desert because, as the artist states, even in the middle of nowhere we want to post on Instagram. Monochromatic paintings, the repetition of broken lines that reveal the contradictions of contemporary society, in which nature made of metal and painted realistically is a symptom of the paradox of being willing to appear what one is not, in order to find one's place in the world, in order to always feel part of a shared collectivity.

Peter Jellitsch was born in Villach, Austria in 1982. He studied at both the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

 His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe and can be found in collections such as the SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MMKK Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten, MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts and the Graphic Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Jellitsch has been the recipient of several grants & awards, including the Strabag Artaward (2014), Theodor Körner Prize (2014), Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Scholarship (2013), and the Outstanding Artist Award of the Republic of Austria (2010). He received the CCA Andratx AiR (2018), MAK-Schindler Scholarship, Los Angeles (2014), as well as scholarship residencies in Montpellier (2014), Paris (2014), and New York (2011).

Peter Jellitsch has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2011.

Text: Matilde Nuzzo, Curator and courtesy of the artist.