Peter Dreher

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. When Dreher was twelve years old, his father was killed fighting in Russia in World War II.

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. He had his first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim.

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. He also created series of landscapes and interiors, flower pieces and skulls. 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.

Dreher was a lecturer of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe from 1965 at the Freiburg location, and from 1968 a professor there. Among his students were Anselm Kiefer, Klaus Merkel and Eva Rosenstiel. He retired from his position as a professor in 1997.

Dreher died in February 2020 at age 87.

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.

At first, Dreher had only intended to paint the glass five or six times, but found he did not want to stop. He painted the glass at least fifty times a year, and was still painting it in the 2010s, saying he would stop "when the motivation stopped". He always painted it centered on a 25 x 20cm neutral grey ground, from the same distance and at life scale. <!-- 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. -->

Self-portraits
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.

Exhibitions
Dreher's works were shown in international exhibitions including:
 * 1954: Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim
 * 1974: Museum Folkwang, Essen
 * 1975: Kunstverein Freiburg
 * 1976: Hans Mayer (gallerist), Düsseldorf
 * 1977: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
 * 1982: Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal
 * 1990: Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg
 * 1993: Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe
 * 2002: Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, California
 * 2008: Kunsthalle Erfurt
 * 2011: Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Geneva
 * 2013: MK Galleries, U.K.

Awards
Among Dreher's awards were:
 * 1965: Villa Massimo
 * 1976: Reinhold-Schneider-Preis of Freiburg
 * 1979: Hans-Thoma-Preis of Baden-Württemberg
 * 1995: Erich-Heckel-Preis of Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg
 * 2000: Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany