{{Use dmy dates|date=February 2020}} {{Short description|German artist (1932–2020)}} {{Infobox artist | name = Peter Dreher | image = Peter Dreher.jpg | caption = Dreher in 2012 | birth_date = {{birth date|df=yes|1932|8|26}} | birth_place = Mannheim, Germany | death_date = {{death date and age|df=yes|2020|2|20|1932|8|26}} | known_for = ''Tag um Tag guter Tag'' | awards = {{plainlist| * Villa Massimo * Reinhold-Schneider-Preis * Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany }} | website = https://peter-dreher.de/ }} '''Peter Dreher''' (26 August 1932 – 20 February 2020) was a German artist and academic teacher. He painted series of landscapes, interiors, flowers and skulls, beginning his series ''Tag um Tag guter Tag'' in 1974. As a professor of painting, he influenced artists including Anselm Kiefer. His works have been exhibited internationally.
== Life == Dreher was born in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg. He began to draw at age seven, determined to become an artist.<ref name="Hübl" /> When Dreher was twelve years old, his father was killed fighting in Russia in World War II.<!-- His house was subsequently destroyed. These traumatic events left Dreher feeling uprooted and painting became a refuge 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 continued to his death.-->
Dreher studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe in the 1950s, when the artistic trend was leaning towards figurative, with Karl Hubbuch and Wilhelm Schnarrenberger, who stood for the New Objectivity movement, and with Erich Heckel, one of the founders of Die Brücke.<ref name="Städel" /><ref name="Hübl" /><ref name="Wagner" /> He had his first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim.<ref name="Städel" /><!-- 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 challenged the viewers to see the differences within the familiarity. Dreher explained 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 became known for his series ''Tag um Tag guter Tag'' which he began in 1974, painting the same glass more than 5,000 times.<ref name="Hübl" /> He also created series of landscapes and interiors, flower pieces and skulls.<!-- Kasper König commented that Dreher applied his principle of exploring painting in an objective way. Dreher mentioned that he “would like to be a machine,” quoting Andy Warhol, so that he could paint objectively, which he felt was necessary for him to accomplish spiritual meditation and reflection when painting.--> While Dreher admired some ideas of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg, he opposed various artistic trends of the 1950s and 1960s, such as abstract expressionism, minimalism, postminimalism and pop art, remaining a realistic and figurative painter.<ref name="Städel" /><!-- Dreher stated, 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 was 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.
"The special gift of perfect pitch is well known. There is at least one literary model to illustrate the perfect sense of smell: that of the perfumer and murderer Jean Baptiste Grenouille in Patrick Süsskind's world-famous novel Perfume. But I know of no-one in the arts and sciences that has thought of applying this gift to vision. Peter Dreher has the gift of "perfect vision". His ability to fragment colours, their blends and nuances, make him an astounding master of illusionism. In this domain Peter Dreher, a pupil of Karl Hubbuch and Erich Heckel, is a phenomenal talent. Conversations with him about his painting often contain combinations of verbs and nouns which are immediately comprehensible, but which would not normally be used. If a colour blend has been unsuccessful, he may remark that "this red doesn't resonate". Peter Dreher is a synaesthetic; he hears colours, and searches for their absolute coherency and harmony. Seeing is not pure mechanistic reproduction, but a highly complex cognitive process. What, then, constitutes the difference between perfect and normal vision? Putting it simply, one could call it the capacity for extremely sensitive fragmentation. Someone with perfect vision can analyse what he sees into its component parts and reconstitute these into the shade he has in mind without having to test, compare or correct it. What distinguishes him from those with "normal vision" is his blind assurance."<ref>Peter Dreher, Fragmente – Gläser – Pflanzen, Publikation anlässlich der Ausstellung Peter Dreher, Salzburg, Thomas Salis Art & Design, 2015</ref> -->
Dreher was a lecturer of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe from 1965 at the Freiburg location,<ref name="Städel" /> and from 1968 a professor there.<ref name="Wagner" /> Among his students were <!--Ralph Fleck, Friedemann Hahn--> Anselm Kiefer, Klaus Merkel and Eva Rosenstiel.<ref name="Städel" /> He retired from his position as a professor in 1997.<ref name="Koppel" />
Dreher died in February 2020 at age 87.<ref name="Hübl" />
== Work == === ''Tag um Tag guter Tag'' === In a series begun in 1974, Dreher painted the same empty glass. Called ''Tag um Tag guter Tag'' (''Day by Day, Good Day''), he painted it more than 2,500 times at night and more than 2,500 times during the daytime, in a process similar to meditation.<ref name="Koppel" /><!--<ref name=Huebl>says 1972-->
At first, Dreher had only intended to paint the glass five or six times, but found he did not want to stop.<ref name=invisible/> He painted the glass at least fifty times a year, and was still painting it in the 2010s,<ref name=tagumtag>{{cite web |last1=Dreher |first1=Peter |title=Tag um Tag guter Tag |url=https://peter-dreher.de/TagumTag |website=peter-dreher.de}} (see subheadigns for 2010s)</ref> saying he would stop "when the motivation stopped".<ref name=invisible>{{cite web |last1=Carington |first1=Annabel |title=Painting Invisible Pictures |url=https://thecaringtonpress.com/2019/08/29/painting-invisible-pictures/ |website=The Carington Press |language=en |date=29 August 2019}}</ref> He always painted it centered on a 25 x 20cm neutral grey ground,<ref name="Hübl" /> from the same distance and at life scale.<ref name=tagumtag/> <!-- 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 believed 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.
This conceptual approach to the glass series had 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 embraced this philosophy and integrated 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 painted the glass, he tried to perceive it without any preconception and paint what he saw objectively at that moment. Dreher stated 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.”
=== Skulls === Since 2005 he produced six large paper works focusing on the skull. The pieces measure 156 x 300 cm and show the motif in a variety of settings. The painting surface was a ten-metre length of paper which Dreher cut into various rectangular formats. He then primed these with black acrylic paint. This had to provide good cover, and be durable and isolated in such a way that it would not mix with the motif placed on top. It took a great deal of trial and error before the right paint was finally found. Once the priming process was complete, the artist used a template to draw the outlines of the skulls. Within this set boundary, he then allowed the very liquid white gouache paint to run over the surface. He intervened very little, allowing the surface too more or less paint itself. Thus, random chance became the "artist". There are several works where the "skulls" are placed on a white background because the artist repainted the surrounding area in white. The agitated brush-strokes are clearly visible at these points. This makes the process of painting the surroundings apparent to the observer. Because of the sheer volume – some formats contain up to one hundred closely ranked skulls – the individual motif loses its weightiness and therefore its capacity to frighten, becoming just a shape. Here too the artist is "working through" an important theme for painters: the relationship between the figure and background. The basic shape, which never denies the use of the template, is kept as simple as possible. There is no modulation of light and shade, no illusion of three-dimensionality on the surface. Instead there is an unending variation of different islands of colour. It is clearly apparent that what mattered to Peter Dreher here was the act of painting itself. Plus the idea of himself as an instrument. Plus random chance. Completely round shapes continued to captivate the artist: in 2006 he produced about 20 small black-and-white drawings roughly the size of a postcard (15 x 10 cm). The fascinating thing in this case is not so much what is there, but what has been left out. The drawing of the skull is only visible as a fragment. Peter Dreher was fascinated with Edmund Husserl's doctrine of "phenomenology" and the aspect of this philosophical teaching known as "shadowing". This is the term used by the philosopher for the impossibility of perceiving an object in its totality. Objects can be observed from an infinite number of perspectives. However, each of the observer's perspectives necessarily obscures the other possible "perspectivist aspects" of the object. Thus, our perception is only an illusion. In essence we only ever see "one image", a detail of the bigger picture. Our brain relies on experience to fill in what we don't see. Thus, our vision is fragmentary, incomplete and, strictly speaking, two-dimensional – as two-dimensional as our reflection in a mirror. Peter Dreher clarified the act of perception with the works he classified under the working title "Fragments". In these "Fragments", observers play a much more active role in the artist-work-artwork triad than they would in a work that is fully formulated to the last detail. <ref>Peter Dreher, Behind the Mirror, Köln, Wienand Verlag, 2017, {{ISBN|978-3-86832-394-8}}</ref> -->
=== Self-portraits === [[File:Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg, Außenfassade des Baues von 1978 mit Selbstbildnissen von Peter D.jpg|thumb|Self portraits (1978), exterior of the library of the University of Freiburg]] From 1977 to 1979, Dreher painted on-site several self-portraits as decoration for the library of the University of Freiburg. When the building was demolished, the portraits found a new location.Currently, they are housed in the basement (1 UG.) of the library in between the bookshelves.<ref name="Hurka" />
=== Exhibitions === Dreher's works were shown in international exhibitions including:<ref name="Städel" /> * 1954: Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim * 1974: Museum Folkwang, Essen * 1975: {{ill|Kunstverein Freiburg|de}} * 1976: {{ill|Hans Mayer (gallerist)|de|Hans Mayer (Galerist)|lt=Galerie Hans Mayer}}, Düsseldorf * 1977: {{ill|Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden|de}} * 1982: Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal * 1990: {{ill|Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg|de}} * 1993: {{ill|Badischer Kunstverein|de}}, Karlsruhe * 2002: Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, California * 2008: {{ill|Kunsthalle Erfurt|de}} * 2011: Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Geneva * 2013: MK Galleries, U.K.
== Awards == Among Dreher's awards were:<ref name="Städel" /><ref name="Wagner" /> * 1965: Villa Massimo * 1976: Reinhold-Schneider-Preis of Freiburg * 1979: {{ill|Hans-Thoma-Preis|de}} of Baden-Württemberg * 1995: Erich-Heckel-Preis of Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg * 2000: Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
== Further reading == * Dreher, Peter, Peter-Dreher-Stiftung: ''Hinter dem Spiegel. Behind the mirror.'' Cologne: Wienand, 2017 * Dreher, Peter: ''Fragmente. Gläser. Pflanzen.'' Salzburg: Thomas von Salis, 2015 * Dreher, Peter: ''Ich. Mich.'' Freiburg: Albert Baumgarten Verlag, 2014 * Dreher, Peter: ''Jahrgangsserie und Silberschalen. Pearl series and silverbowls''. Freiburg: Albert Baumgarten Verlag, 2014 * Dreher, Peter, Monika Machnicki et al.: [https://www.amazon.de/dp/3937014837 ''Peter Dreher: Tag um Tag guter Tag''] Freiburg im Breisgau: Modo, 2008. * Spira, Anthony; Kate Bush. ''Peter Dreher: Just Painting.'' London: Occasional Papers, 2014 {{ISBN| 978-0-9569623-9-3}}
==References== <references>
<ref name="Hübl">{{cite news | last = Hübl | first = Michael | url = https://bnn.de/nachrichten/kultur/maler-peter-dreher-gestorben-bilderserie-tag-um-tag-guter-tag-bekanntestes-werk | title = Maler Peter Dreher gestorben: Bilderserie "Tag um Tag guter Tag" bekanntestes Werk | newspaper = Badische Neueste Nachrichten | date = 20 February 2020 | language = de | accessdate = 21 February 2020 | archive-date = 21 February 2020 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20200221210203/https://bnn.de/nachrichten/kultur/maler-peter-dreher-gestorben-bilderserie-tag-um-tag-guter-tag-bekanntestes-werk | url-status = dead }}</ref>
<ref name="Hurka">{{cite news | last = Hurka | first = Herbert M. | url = https://www.badische-zeitung.de/freiburger-maler-peter-dreher-stirbt-im-alter-von-87-jahren--182990450.html | title = Freiburger Maler Peter Dreher stirbt im Alter von 87 Jahren | newspaper = Badische Zeitung | date = 20 February 2020 | language = de | accessdate = 22 February 2020 }}</ref>
<ref name="Koppel">{{cite web | url = https://www.alankoppel.com/exhibitions/peter-dreher-day-by-day-good-day | title = Peter Dreher: Day by Day, Good Day | website = Alan Koppel Gallery | date = | accessdate = 21 February 2020 }}</ref>
<ref name="Städel">{{cite web | url = https://cafedeutschland.staedelmuseum.de/gespraeche/peter-dreher/bio | title = Peter Dreher | website = Städel Museum | date = | accessdate = 22 February 2020 }}</ref>
<ref name="Wagner">{{cite web | url = https://www.galerie-wagner-partner.com/de/artists/peter-dreher#Vita | title = Peter Dreher / Vita | website = Galerie Wagner | date = | language = de | accessdate = 21 February 2020 }}</ref>
</references>
== External links == {{commonscat}} * {{DNB portal|118527312}} * {{official|http://www.peter-dreher.de/}} * [https://www.kuenstlerbund-bawue.de/mitglieder/?members_page=6 Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg] * [http://www.artnet.de/k%c3%bcnstler/peter-dreher/ Peter Dreher] artnet.de * [https://www.koeniggalerie.com/artists/52241/peter-dreher/works/ Peter Dreher] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200221233238/https://www.koeniggalerie.com/artists/52241/peter-dreher/works/ |date=21 February 2020 }} Galerie König * Lynne Tillman: [https://bombmagazine.org/articles/peter-dreher/ Peter Dreher] (interview) bombmagazine.org * Yidan Zhang: [https://www.swr.de/swr2/kunst-und-ausstellung/100-Sekunden-Kunst-40-Jahre-dasselbe-Motiv-Tag-um-Tag-guter-Tag-von-Peter-Dreher,aexavarticle-swr-42208.html Peter Dreher: Tag um Tag guter Tag]{{Dead link|date=December 2025 |bot=InternetArchiveBot }} (in German) in ''100 Sekunden Kunst'', SWR
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Dreher, Peter}} Category:1932 births Category:2020 deaths Category:Recipients of the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany Category:Artists from Mannheim