CV, Bio, Bibliography
Gilles Pegel's practice moves freely between sculpture, installation, painting and mixed media. While individual works may appear formally unrelated, they all stem from the same ongoing attempt to understand the structures that shape contemporary life, whether biological, technological, social, economic or cultural.
Projects often begin with highly personal observations, encounters or moments of curiosity. Artistic references, scientific concepts, internet culture, consumer products, industrial processes and everyday objects can all serve as starting points. Through a process of reduction and transformation, these initial impulses gradually evolve into works that function as distilled moments of reflection. They do not seek to provide answers. Instead, they become bookmarks in an ongoing attempt to understand the world, ways of processing and situating the moment in which they were made.
Many works emerge from subtle shifts applied to existing forms, objects or systems. Familiar visual languages are displaced just enough to reveal assumptions that usually remain invisible. Certain geometries and motifs reappear across different bodies of work, gradually detaching themselves from their original context and acquiring new meanings through changes of material, scale or function. This continuous migration reflects an interest in evolution rather than stylistic consistency.
Humour, ambiguity and precision coexist throughout the practice. Industrial fabrication techniques stand alongside handcrafted processes, while references to technology, economics, warfare, artificial intelligence and internet culture remain grounded in a strong attention to materiality and sculptural presence. The choice of medium is never incidental. Each work seeks the form that most accurately embodies the questions it investigates, allowing sculpture, painting, installation and other media to coexist without hierarchy.
Pop culture, corporate aesthetics and the visual languages of contemporary media frequently appear throughout the work. They are not used as quotations or illustrations, but as the vernacular of the present, signs through which contemporary society communicates, constructs identity and projects desire. By working with these familiar symbols, the works remain accessible while encouraging viewers to look beyond their immediate recognition.
Instead of constructing closed narratives, Pegel's works remain deliberately open to multiple readings. They examine the infrastructures, images and systems that increasingly organise contemporary existence while, above all, serving as bookmarks in an ongoing attempt to understand the world.