Peles Empire – not flat

The artist collective Peles Empire was founded at the Städel School in Frankfurt by Katharina Stöver and Barbara Wolff in 2005. The eponymous Peles Castle in Rumania’s Carpathian Mountains, a summer residence completed in the late 19th century for King Carol I, is characterised by pompous architecture and decorations in the style of diverse historical epochs. The castle forms the starting point and artistic material for the works of the Berlin-based artists. The exhibition project 'not flat' in the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum’s Rudolf Scharpf Galerie is devoted to the long-term development of their work. Through constant reproduction, the sculptural works of the ‘Peles Empire’ increasingly diverge from the original. Each new work was founded on the idea on a renewed level of repetitions and the back reference to the original pictorial material. In the meanwhile, this sometime also contains the reproduction of their own works that were exhibited at an earlier point in time. This method infinitely heightens the distortion that was still comprehensible at the outset. The currently produce works that distance themselves from the pictorial jargon of the castle while back referencing it at the same time, relating its own very personal story of the original.

Curator: Jana Franze