With Steps towards salvation, PERG presented the work of Harlem-based artist Jay West, whose practice moves between painting, street culture, music and fashion. The exhibition extended PERG’s ongoing interest in artistic positions that operate across cultural contexts, bringing the immediacy of popular imagery into dialogue with art history, abstraction and contemporary visual production.

West describes his approach as Pop Expressionism: a meeting of emotionally charged abstraction and the recognisable language of popular culture. Abstract grounds establish the atmosphere of each work before cartoon figures, religious symbols, technological references and fragments of mythology enter the composition. Rather than resolving these elements into a single narrative, West allows them to remain in tension.

Familiar images become unstable in the process. Figures associated with entertainment, consumer culture or childhood memory are displaced from their original contexts and absorbed into densely constructed pictorial worlds. Humour and visual accessibility draw the viewer in, while recurring contrasts between celebration and oppression, triumph and defeat introduce a more complex emotional register.

West’s practice has never been confined to the conventional gallery system. His visual language has developed through exchanges with the wider cultural environment of Harlem and through collaborations across art, music and fashion. His work has appeared in projects connected to A$AP Rocky and A$AP Ferg, including the art direction for Ferg’s debut album Trap Lord, alongside collaborations with brands including BAPE, Nike and Levi’s. These intersections are not peripheral to the paintings, but form part of the cultural vocabulary from which they emerge.

The title Steps towards salvation suggests movement rather than arrival. Salvation is not presented as a final state, but as a process shaped by contradiction, repetition and the continuous reconstruction of meaning. Within West’s paintings, sacred imagery meets commercial symbolism, visual pleasure coexists with unease, and the promise of transcendence remains embedded within the realities of contemporary culture.

Steps towards salvation brought Jay West’s Harlem-rooted practice into PERG’s programme, expanding the gallery’s dialogue between contemporary art, street culture and the visual languages that move between them. The exhibition was presented at PERG, Asperger Str. 12, 71634 Ludwigsburg, Germany.