The German artist Peter Piller gives photographs from newspapers and archives a second lease of life. Piller collects images that are familiar to everyone. He finds them in the filing cabinets of regional newspapers or in the archives of the company that sells aerial photos of houses. Freed of their original purpose, what is perceived as boring or monotonous at first glance proves to be a treasure trove containing undiscovered relationships and exciting meanings.
In this book, Peter Piller is presenting a portrait of a Dutch community using photographs and images he found in the regional newspaper or in the archive of local companies. One copy of this publication was given to each inhabitant of Nijverdal/Hellendoorn.
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.
