Peter DreherHommage an die Malerei/ Hommage to Painting

“… and today there are 5,000”; in summer 2012 Peter Dreher celebrated his eightieth birthday. The diverse artistic oeuvre of this Mannheim-born professor emeritus of the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe finds its culmination in a series that has been continued without interruption since 1974. The panels, in oil on canvas or on painting board and each measuring 25 x 20 cm, invariably show a single glass under the title that sums up the series, “Every day is a good day.” On the occasion of his donation of more than 400 works from this series to the Museum für Neue Kunst in Freiburg, the artist wrote in a contribution: “One notion I had at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies was to paint a picture that is invisible. That is of course an impossible brief. A brief that seems impossible to realise other than by painting the simplest thing possible … The simplest thing there is, is the inescapable reality that surrounds us. I always had a reluctance towards pictures laden with meaning, towards narrative pictures. Yet the single picture loses its relation to reality as soon as it is repeated. It is then nothing but painting. That was how I hit upon the idea of painting the same thing over and over again … I still remember it exactly: the concept for the glass series – it was April 1974, and I was lying in a hot bath – was there within a single second. All at once I knew precisely: it has to be an object, and this object must always be at the same distance from me, always in the same artificial light … At the time I thought I would make five or six pictures of this kind, without changing the motif, so that people would understand what was meant. So at first there were six, and then I felt like painting one more and another one – and today there are 5,000.”

Exhibition:
Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, 25/11/2012–7/4/2013