Peer Kriesel (German, b. 1979) is a Berlin-based artist whose drawings and paintings build grimacing faces and fantastical figures out of calligraphic, semi-automatic mark-making.,He calls this body of work Fratzen, or grimaces, and describes drawing them as entering a meditative, self-forgetting state akin to the automatism practiced by the Surrealists, a connection he has also drawn to AI image generation.
In an essay titled Das statistische Unbewusste, he traces the method to frottage, the technique of rubbing graphite over textured surfaces that Max Ernst used, and to André Breton's idea of psychic automatism. Kriesel connects that same loss of conscious control to generative AI tools such as Photoshop's Firefly, invoking the philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli's concept of a statistical unconscious to describe how both operate at the edge of knowledge and chance.
Since the early 2020s he has developed FRTZNABSTRCTN, a body of superimposed portraits made with calligraphic lines in watercolor, oil, acrylic and mixed media that combine abstraction with hidden figurative and geometric forms.He has also shown NFT-based work in group exhibitions, including “Beyond Time And Space” at TingDAO in New York in 2021 and “into the unknown” at despace.berlin in 2022.
In 2017 he presented me so small, an installation combining a wall drawing generated by a 3D-printed self-portrait figure with an aged, rusty gold mask, contrasting older and newer forms of written communication.In 2024 he took part in “Le Nouveau Biedermeier”, a group show of more than 30 international artists curated by Lisa Junghanß at TICK TACK in Antwerp, and held a solo exhibition, “FRTZNABSTRCTN”, at Schlieder Contemporary in Frankfurt.,In 2026 he launched Surreal Visions, a hand-drawn tarot and oracle card deck developed from his sketchbooks and inspired by the Surrealists' Jeu de Marseille tarot deck, funded through a Kickstarter campaign and presented at paper positions berlin.,
