Peter Vahlefeld’s paintings grapple with reflections over marketing strategies in art. He has recognized that works of art in our culture inevitably are reduced to the condition of commodity.

What he does is to short-circuit the process and start with the commodity. Peter Vahlefeld overpaints readymade images like advertisements or marketing campaigns of international galleries, museums, and auction houses. The overpainted printed matter will then be digitalized and reworked on the computer, rendering the three-dimensional overpainting as a two-dimensional background for the new painting on canvas.

The result is a multilayered composition in which figure and ground seem to continually shift between the analog painting and its digital counterpart.