Peter Dreher

Peter Dreher
Born August 26, 1932
Mannheim

Peter Dreher (born August 26, 1932) is a German artist. As professor emeritus of painting, he has influenced a generation of internationally acclaimed artists, including Anselm Kiefer. Dreher has painted series using landscapes and interiors, flower pieces and skulls. His magnum opus is Tag um Tag guter Tag (Day by Day good Day), a series he started working on in 1974. This work received worldwide recognition and praise. Dreher paints realistic objects with a twist of abstraction. His works of art successfully incorporate deconstructive elements of an object without losing its naturalistic beauty.

Life

Childhood and artistic background

Dreher was born in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. When he was 7 years old, he began to draw with determination of becoming an artist. His childhood was deeply affected under the Nazi Regime. When Dreher was 12 years old, his father, a German officer, was killed while fighting in Russia and his house was subsequently destroyed. These traumatic events left Dreher feeling uprooted and painting became a refugee for him, as it allowed him to be disconnected from the outside world. While he was drawing or painting, he was able to be in his own thoughts without interruption.

Dreher felt as if he was living without a home and when he was 29 years old, he decided to build his own house in hope that it would remedy his state of homelessness. Dreher realized that a “home” was not connected to a physical place. Instead, a home is a creation you make through painting, thinking or other actions. He found his home in his magnum opus, the series Day by Day good Day, which he started in 1974 and continues to this day.

Artistic style

In the 1950s, Dreher went to the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, when the artistic trend was leaning towards figurative. His trainings were under a number of prominent professors, including Karl Hubbuch and Wilhelm Schnarrenberger, who were part of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, as well as under Erich Heckel, one of the founders of Die Brücke movement. As a student, Dreher also received classical training, where he learned to paint still lifes.

Dreher originally painted still lifes with restrained objectivity but he gradually perceived the objects as paintings instead of objects, which meant he painted for the sake of painting. This approach led him to do different experiments, which would later make him a distinguished artist. He often painted everyday objects, including a nail, scissors, a clock, and landscapes, but it is not merely about reproduction. Rather, he challenges the viewers to see the differences within the familiarity. Dreher explains his approach by citing Japanese artist Hiroshige’s statement that “a beautiful landscape bores him while mediocre and familiar things have the implicit capacity to appear new again and again.”

Dreher is famous mostly for his glass series, Day by Day good Day, but he has also created series using landscapes and interiors, flower pieces and skulls. Kasper König comments that Dreher applies his principle of exploring painting in an objective way. Dreher mentions that he “would like to be a machine,” quoting Andy Warhol, so that he can paint objectively, which he feels is necessary for him to accomplish spiritual meditation and reflection when painting.

While Dreher admired and understood Andy Warhol’s and other artists, like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg’s ideas, he went against the artistic trend of the 1950s and 1960s. Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Postminimalism, Pop Art, and Action Painting were among the popular artistic movements, but Dreher remained a realistic and figurative painter. Dreher states, regarding his experience as an artist during that time, “Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock, reigned over the whole art world. You were asked, ‘What do you paint?’ If you said, ‘I am a realistic painter,’ they went away.” Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, artistic trends continued to change at remarkable speed, however Dreher remained true to his realistic style.

Dreher is often compared to On Kawara or Roman Opałka, artists who work with millions of numbers and signs, respectively. Their works deal with the idea of time and try to capture the transcience of life work, but they were not created as part of a series, like Dreher’s. For Dreher, what interested him was the idea of painting for the sake of painting, which is contrary to the constant innovation and progress that are characteristics of contemporary artists. This approach reconstructs the initial harmony of painting and this is what defines a painter as a painter.

Job as professor and influence on other artists

In the 1960s, Dreher was hired to be a Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe. During his professorship, he has taught and influenced many internationally acclaimed artists, including Ralph Fleck, Friedemann Hahn, and Anselm Kiefer.

Tag um Tag guter Tag / Day by Day good Day

Peter Dreher paints the same empty glass in a series that he started in 1974 and after more than 40 years, he is still working on it. He had painted the same glass more than 2,500 times at night and more than 2,500 times during the daytime. Why would an artist paint the same object for more than 40 years? His series challenges us to think about the differences between receptive and productive processing in how we perceive the world around us. To explain his work, Dreher adopted the term, “phenomenological reduction” from Edmund Husserl’s philosophy on a special form of knowledge. He believes that our perception of the world is pre-structured with knowledge that we already have. Therefore we do not necessarily see objectively. Instead what we see is embedded with our own experiences, interests, expectations, and values.

The glass is always in the same place in his studio and it is always painted life-sized and when viewers look at the series, their initial response is likely to be that they are all the same. While they may be correct that the paintings are of the same subject, each painting reveals something different about the glass. Some glasses are light and clear and some are dark and heavy. Some of the glasses show clear reflections of windows or other things and some reflections are blurry. Dreher forces us to look at the work as objectively as possible and allow ourselves to process each painting as if it were a totally new visual experience. The paintings are realistic in style but by putting them together into a series, the work becomes abstract and conceptual.

This conceptual approach to the glass series has influences from Chinese Chan (Zen) Buddhism, which emphasizes on being alert in the here as one experiences the present. The title of this magnum opus, Day by Day good Day, is part of a quote shared by the influential ninth-century Chinese Zen master, Yunmen Wenyan. The quote can be found in the 6th Edition of the book, Bi-Yän-Lu (Blue Cliff Record), which is a collection of one hundred aphorisms that help people move towards a mystical experience of unity and “awakening” in life. The Zen Buddhists believe that every single piece and object of the world are of the same values and that we should be mindful of our surroundings and observe them without judgment and allow ourselves to perceive the world objectively.

The Pali canon states how Zen Buddhist monks should be mindful: "He watches untiringly with a clear mind, insightfully grounded in his body watching over the body, with his emotions watching over the emotions, with his awareness over his consciousness and with his mind over his mind. One could all this an all-encompassing and undivided attention for what is experienced in the moment, and an elaborate practice of self-reflection—an extraordinarily modern claim and approach which is taken up by present-day psychotherapy and then adapted to one’s own purposes."

Peter Dreher embraces this philosophy and integrates it with Husserl’s philosophy to create this masterpiece. In this way, Dreher is often compared to the famous still life reduction artist, Giorgio Morandi, for they both have similar approaches to painting the same everyday objects by capturing the present moment of seeing the object. Every single time Dreher paints the glass, he tries to perceive it without any preconception and paint what he sees objectively at that moment. Dreher states that painting the glass “is the only place and the only hours in my life when I really feel quiet. Maybe I don’t make the impression of being unquiet, but I am.”

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

2014

Peter Dreher - Tag um Tag Guter Tag (Day by day Good day), Galerie WAGNER + PARTNER, Berlin, Germany.

2013

Peter Dreher, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, GB.

Peter Dreher - Tag um Tag guter Tag, Kunstverein Reutlingen, Germany.

2012

Peter Dreher - The Clover Flower, Galerie WAGNER + PARTNER, Berlin, Germany.

2009

Tag um Tag guter Tag, Kunstverein Münsterland, Germany.

2008

Tag um Tag guter Tag, Kunstverein Ulm, Germany.

Tag um Tag guter Tag, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Germany.

2007

Beachcomber Shores, Galerie WAGNER + PARTNER, Berlin, Germany.

Peter Dreher, The Approach, London, Great Britain.

Group exhibitions

2010

25 + 25 - 25 Künstler aus 25 Jahren, Kunstverein Ettlingen, Germany.

Realismus—Das Abenteuer der Wirklichkeit, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, Germany.

Der innere Blick—Das Interieur in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany.

2008

Zerbrechliche Schönheit, Glas im Blick der Kunst, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany.

I Just Wanted You to Love Me, Peter Dreher, Natascha Stellmach & SPAM, Galerie WAGNER + PARTNER, Berlin, Germany.

2007

Athens Biennial, Athens, Greece.

Honors and awards

2000 Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit), Germany.

1995 Erich-Heckel-Preis, Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

1979 Hans-Thoma-Staatspreis, Germany.

1976 Reinhold-Schneider-Preis, Freiburg, Germany.

1965 Villa Massimo, Rome, Italy.

1958 Kunstpreis der Jugend, Germany.

Sources and further reading

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 7/26/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.