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Galerie-P6-Berlin is pleased to present ‘Pleasure Haze’, a solo collection of works by Danish artist Philip Pedersen. Ranging from the 1990s queer alternative club scene in London through documentary photography, painting, and collage to his more lush, hyper-realistic oil paintings and portraits of queer characters today, Pedersen plays with a wide spectrum of mediums.

Fantasy and fiction, drama and decadence, beauty and vulnerability: a handful of elements from the pleasure spectrum of life. These can serve as playful accessories to an experience, or alternatively: an escape from the reality within. Who are we alone and in a crowd? For Pedersen, the odyssey of identity can be found in the process of creation.

The artist spent a formative era of his life documenting London's alternative queer culture /club scene in the 90s. He often frequented ‘Trade' at the venue Turnmills, an infamous queer club night that boasted the first 24-hour dance-club license in Britain.

This new-found freedom became a gateway for shameless over-the-top excess and self-expression in club life- with a riotous explosion of colour, naked flesh, and pop-art visuals that seemed hyper-real, even without the aid of the free-flowing ‘stimulants’ of the scene.

The vivid cast of characters - club freaks, celebrities, rent boys, prostitutes, S&M swingers, gangsters, and transvestites would cram into the venue and release their joy onto the dance floor in a debaucherous mayhem- and Pedersen was there to capture it all.

His psychedelic imagery and portraits convey his impressions from a moment in this wildly magical time from a stance within this sub-world.

As these experiences resonated throughout his life, Pedersen continued to also use queer people as his subjects but shifted his focus to creating luscious hyper-realistic oil paintings of men (and his attentive studio - assistant cat Zuma) reminiscent of this wondrous era. Hailing from Peruvian and Danish parents, Pedersen further incorporates into some of his works reliquaries of his Peruvian roots, such as tribal ornaments, dripping in glitter and lacquer– a glimmer of the days of excess gone by.

Each with an individual story to tell, be it through painting, collage, drawing, or documentary photo, Pedersen’s works for the exhibition 'Pleasure Haze’ portray the raw beauty and energy of a life of freedom and evolution that transcends time and place.