Peter Jellitsch

In his series Drift Diagrams (2026), Peter Jellitsch explores the relationship between structure and gestural movement. The starting point is a grid reminiscent of diagrams or coordinate systems. Gestural traces of blue color move across it, defying order and wandering across the field as visual "drifts." The works read like records of movement—between analysis and intuition.

In the middle of a forest clearing stands a vertical object: a twelve-meter-high palm tree with black and white stripes—neither naturally grown nor integrated into the landscape, but placed there like an exclamation mark.
This sculpture by Peter Jellitsch breaks radically with its surroundings. While the native trees grow in organic rhythms—supported by an idea of nature that is as culturally influenced as it is historically shifted—this palm tree follows a strict code: black, white, black, white. What appears to be an error—a palm tree in the middle of the forest—is a precisely composed disruptive signal. An intervention that raises questions: What is nature? What is artificiality? What is our projection of “naturalness”? The black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the palm leaves refers to more than pure aesthetics. It is a symbol of duality – of nature and artificiality, of here and there, of reality and fiction. As in Lewis Carroll's “Through the Looking-Glass”, where a chessboard becomes the threshold to another world, this palm tree also opens a mental portal: it marks a transition, an in-between. A grid that does not organize, but destabilizes. The clear coding tips into the surreal – what just seemed familiar begins to flicker. This portal is not a door, but a perception: a moment of irritation that questions everything. The sculpture stands in absolute solitude and yet communicates. It may not speak in words, but in contrasting forms and meanings. Jellitsch has succeeded here in creating a three-dimensional drawing on a scale of 1:1—a dotted line that does not run on paper, but in the landscape. It combines digital aesthetics with sculptural gestures, ironic shifts with serious spatial assertions. A palm tree where none should grow—and yet something grows here: an idea, a doubt, a new image. (Peter Jellitsch, 2025)

Peter Jellitsch was selected as artistic ambassador of Mandarin Oriental Vienna. He developed and designed the trademark fan of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. 

Press Release: "Created by celebrated Austrian artist Peter Jellitsch, the fan of Mandarin Oriental, Vienna is a modern symphony of contrast and harmony. Expressive brushstrokes sweep across a precise geometric grid, capturing the dynamic balance between movement and stillness, spontaneity and structure. This artistic dialogue mirrors the soul of the hotel itself - a seamless blend of cultural heritage and refined modernity. Drawing inspiration from Vienna's artistic lineage, Jellitsch infuses the design with influences from Art Nouveau and his signature visual language. The fan's chequerboard motif evokes order and architectural form, while fluid gestures of colour convey emotion and vitality. Bridging the physical and digital worlds, the artwork becomes a contemporary narrative, a symbol of where the city's centuries-old craftsmanship meets its forward-looking creativity."

Video

Paperback with flaps, 120 pages, 26 x 19,5 cm, ills. in color

Edited by: tentabsopen
Artist: Peter Jellitsch
Texts by: Vanessa Bersis, Andreas Maurer
Language: English, German
195 x 260 mm
ISBN 978-3-200-09745-2a

BUY

All photos: © Leo Hilzensauer

Für raising flags gestalteten 26 internationale Künstler*innen Flaggen, die seit 1. Mai 2023 rund sechs Monate lang in einem Kulminationsgebiet beim Wienfluss, auf der Stubenbrücke, an zahlreichen Standorten in Wien, in virtuellen Ausstellungsräumen und in medialen Räumen von Zeitungen und Magazinen präsentiert werden. raising flags ist ein Wien-Projekt von museum in progress, das den Stadtraum neu vermisst und dabei in seiner auffälligen Präsenz nicht übersehen werden kann.

Paperback, 140 pages, 31 x 22 cm, ills. in color

(photos: © Leonhard Hilzensauer / except photo no.1/7: © Lukas Gansterer )

Softcover, 82 pages, 26 x 19,5 cm, ills. in color

All photos: © Leonhard Hilzensauer

All photos: © Leonhard Hilzensauer

All photos: © Leonhard Hilzensauer

Softcover, 70 pages, 26 x 19,5 cm, ills. in color

All photos: © Leonhard Hilzensauer

Numbered Edition of 300, 48 pages, full color, 21 x 26,5 cm

In the Burgkapelle, Peter Jellitsch takes into account the central fresco by Ferdinand Fromiller. He selects individual parts of the Baroque trompe-l'œil painting - renderings of intangible content, atmospheres, moods, interpersonal connections - and confronts them with an abstract picture analysis. The specific elaborated fragments are shown as drawings and objects on display tables which bring to mind study situations. The viewer then relates the transformations to the original.
Excerpt from the folder „It could be like this…“, a text by Christine Wetzlinger-Grundnig.

Signed and numbered edition of 200
24 pages, digital offset, 12,7 x 17,8 cm

Peter Jellitsch’s Data Drawings are based on what has become an indispensable component of our modern-day (work) life: the Internet and the constant availability of a wireless connection to it. The artist repetitively translates measurable data from Wi-Fi connections in the form of ping, download, and upload speeds into formally complex drawings reminiscent of landscape topographies in pencil and acrylic. He lends form to the invisible digital processes around us and declares them the starting point and necessary basis of his work as an artist. Each Data Drawing is a snapshot and a survey of a specific place at a certain point in time. The numerical values precisely measured with an iPhone app have the appearance of an abstract artistic gesture on the paper with the unmistakable variance of human imprecision. The physical act of drawing is combined with the ubiquitous flows of information that we use and create at the same time: a potentially infinite and never complete creation of value from nothing.

Excerpt from „Without You I’m Nothing“, a text by Marlies Wirth.

The data for Long Island City was provided by the SP Weather Station, Natalie Campbell and Heidi Neilson.

www.spweatherstation.net

Peter Jellitsch is an exponent of a young generation whose perception of reality has undergone a radical change, due to new technology, and who quite naturally spread out their fields of work and ideas in new dimensions. This expansion of traditional boundaries, together with a critical observation of reality, are prerequisites for his work, and characterise the artist's interdisciplinary, integrative way of thinking as well as his methods and techniques, which on the one hand are scientific and strictly mathematical, and on the other absolutely artistic and aesthetic. The pictorial result is merely one aspect of Jellitch's comprehensive spectrum of activities. It is, however, the immediate, compelling result which, detached from the intellectual, conceptual process, convincingly gains in autonomy.

Over recent years, virtual space has increasingly become a field of experiment in art. If initially the new techniques and networks were used as tools, today this space itself stands at our disposal, understood as a relevant dimension of reality and determined not only by matter but, in this context, also by invisible elements and systems. What Peter Jellitsch finds interesting are phenomena which exist not physically and consistently, but functionally – such as fields of electromagnetic waves, current patterns, or the swarm behaviour of birds and fish, as in the present work "STB/S 16“.

The artist is not concerned with creating a copy of the digital image of a piece of basic scientific research; his interest, as he puts it, is in "establishing a dialogue between virtual processes and the actual physical space". The artist approaches electronic simulation through drawing by hand, transferring it, by means of the potential of his physical body, into an analogue result, thus concretising the digital information of the virtual sphere.

Christine Wetzlinger-Grundnig (Director, Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten)