Peter Piller's peripheral excursions around Bremen.
For more than twenty years Peter Piller has been making peripheral excursions, or Peripheriewanderungen (Periphery Walks) in various European cities. In Hamburg, the Ruhr region, Bonn, Graz, and Barcelona he has explored small sections of areas marking the outer borders of urban settlement in cities and regions of varying size. In carrying out these walks Piller follows things that catch his eye as well as cues from his memory, ending his excursion once he feels unable to take in anything more. When something particularly interests him on one of his explorations, he departs from his determined routes, wanders around through the area, or even simply waits for a key moment. Archives of photographs result, which he subsequently expands upon in his studio with his Erinnerungszeichnungen (Drawings from Memory). In these mental maps the medium of drawing supplements that of photography and vice versa.
Peter Piller values the "advantages of a lack of intention." In his archives, he accordingly collects amateurish press photos of unspectacular situations with regional significance. He shows aerial views of German residential areas or redesigns the cover of the military magazine Armeerundschau from the days of the German Democratic Republic. These are documents of a petty-bourgeois society which, seen with Piller's eyes, turns out to have grotesque characteristics. Recently he has turned his attention to black-and-white pictorial documentation of cave drawings, the oldest traces of human civilization.
Peter Piller (born 1968 in Fritzlar, Germany) studied German language and literature and trained as a visual artist.
He has been working with found images, photography and drawing since the 1990s. Ever since working at a newspaper press clipping service as an art student in Hamburg, Piller has concerned himself with the collection of visual material and its subsequent re-contextualization into thematic series, in order to give it new meaning and dimensions. To this day, the Peter Piller Archive has grown to thousands of images—its sources including a commercial aerial photography archive, images from the internet as well as historical postcards. Informed by his perceptive observations and subtle sense of humor, this archive is constantly and meticulously rearranged to represent new associative formations that offer insightful perspectives on the activities and rituals of daily life. The wide spectrum of subject matter ranges from the depiction of (cultural) landscapes, people touching cars or looking into holes, to the juxtaposition of traditional role models, protest signs, trained dogs and much more.
Piller has exhibited widely such as with
Richard Prince at the Weserburg Museum, Bremen in 2021. Further solo exhibitions include the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München; Mies van der Rohe Haus, Berlin; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstforum Baloise, Basel; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, among others. He has participated in numerous group shows, most recently at the Weserburg Museum, Bremen and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, but also at Centre de la Photographie Genève; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Lenbachhaus, Munich; MoMa PS1, New York City; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, to name just a few. Peter Piller's work can be found in public collections such as Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Ludwig, Cologne; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg; Sammlung Rheingold, Mönchengladbach; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, among others. Piller is a professor of fine art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Prior to this, he was the professor of photography at the HGB Leipzig, from 2006 to 2018.
