Peter Piller
28 Feb - 14 Apr 2012
PETER PILLER
Noch Immer Sturm (Still Storming)
28 February - 14 April, 2012
Over the past decade Peter Piller has compiled thousands of images –from unspectacular newspaper photographs to old postcards or abandoned archives. His body of work has been created through re-ordering and staging new and existing images, giving them a new meaning through this re-arrangements and the making of unexpected associations. Piller’s archivistic and archaeological operations on this visual material provide a way of understanding how meaning is produced through pictures.
In Peter Piller’s own words: “Collecting for me is often a stirring up, not an answering of questions. This is what interests me so much about it. And naturally I am often astonished by how an interest in a seemingly mundane subject can become more and more complex, and how much more information images contain than one would think at first glance”.*
For his fourth exhibition at ProjecteSD, Peter Piller presents a new, never shown to date, archive photographic series, a constellation of thirty archival black and white prints which he groups under the title Immer noch Sturm (Still Storming). The work combines images of exposed, desolate, bald landscapes with images of rough seas. They are all found images collected from old postcards showing scenes of land after war “storms” during World War I and old books published in the same period. Despite the supposedly opposed nature of the land and the sea views, the two sets of images blend in a kind of romantic image of a “storming” scape, where some similarities between the two kinds of images can be found. The reference to the classic representations of war landscapes in the history of painting is probably evident.
The idea of landscape appears in Piller’s oeuvre since his early works in the late 90’s. His fondness of urban fringes and zones of vagueness is already present in one of his first newspapers series Noch ist nichts zu sehen (There is nothing to be seen yet). This was actually the subject of his first book** published in 1995 even before the photo series was developed. In a way, the new series, Immer noch Sturm (Still Storming), shares some of the qualities and ideas in the early series. The images of seas and land exposed views appear as “scenes” where “there is not much not be seen”, unintentionally special and inadvertently aesthetic pictures. Images filled with melancholy and wit, and eccentric beauty.
Within this idea of landscape, another set of new works is presented in the office area of the gallery. In July 2011 the artist walked the entire periphery of Barcelona. His wanderings through the urban Barcelona borderland resulted in more than forty photographs and a set of fifteen pencil and ink drawings, Periphery Walk Barcelona (2011). Seven of these drawings are on display. They oscillate between representational sketches and cartographic notes or illustrations, associative measurements of space, and abstract recordings. The photographs show unspectacular places on the city outskirts where the ordinary eye would notice hardly anything worth shooting. The complete exploratory walk drawings and photo-survey is available for consultation at the gallery.
Again this connects with some of Piller’s early series of works, Wanderings through the Periphery of Hamburg (1994-95) that evolved even before his archive, but that already clearly showed the artist ́s interests in forms of documenting and archiving, as well as his predilection for peripheral urban zones.
To complement the exhibition, Peter Piller presents a set of found books that have been selected between him and artist Jochen Lempert and extracted from each other’s libraries. A total of around twenty-five titles, most of them older publications, which do show a quite subjective, somehow eclectic, unpredictable and unfashionable look into a few subjects. Mostly dealing with photographic content, one can find among the books celebrated titles as the Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg; The Uncanny by recently deceased extraordinary artist Mike Kelley, or the rare book by Carl André Quincy book.
*Interarchive. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2002
**Peter Piller. Noch ist nichts zu sehen. Material Verlag. Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, 1998
Noch Immer Sturm (Still Storming)
28 February - 14 April, 2012
Over the past decade Peter Piller has compiled thousands of images –from unspectacular newspaper photographs to old postcards or abandoned archives. His body of work has been created through re-ordering and staging new and existing images, giving them a new meaning through this re-arrangements and the making of unexpected associations. Piller’s archivistic and archaeological operations on this visual material provide a way of understanding how meaning is produced through pictures.
In Peter Piller’s own words: “Collecting for me is often a stirring up, not an answering of questions. This is what interests me so much about it. And naturally I am often astonished by how an interest in a seemingly mundane subject can become more and more complex, and how much more information images contain than one would think at first glance”.*
For his fourth exhibition at ProjecteSD, Peter Piller presents a new, never shown to date, archive photographic series, a constellation of thirty archival black and white prints which he groups under the title Immer noch Sturm (Still Storming). The work combines images of exposed, desolate, bald landscapes with images of rough seas. They are all found images collected from old postcards showing scenes of land after war “storms” during World War I and old books published in the same period. Despite the supposedly opposed nature of the land and the sea views, the two sets of images blend in a kind of romantic image of a “storming” scape, where some similarities between the two kinds of images can be found. The reference to the classic representations of war landscapes in the history of painting is probably evident.
The idea of landscape appears in Piller’s oeuvre since his early works in the late 90’s. His fondness of urban fringes and zones of vagueness is already present in one of his first newspapers series Noch ist nichts zu sehen (There is nothing to be seen yet). This was actually the subject of his first book** published in 1995 even before the photo series was developed. In a way, the new series, Immer noch Sturm (Still Storming), shares some of the qualities and ideas in the early series. The images of seas and land exposed views appear as “scenes” where “there is not much not be seen”, unintentionally special and inadvertently aesthetic pictures. Images filled with melancholy and wit, and eccentric beauty.
Within this idea of landscape, another set of new works is presented in the office area of the gallery. In July 2011 the artist walked the entire periphery of Barcelona. His wanderings through the urban Barcelona borderland resulted in more than forty photographs and a set of fifteen pencil and ink drawings, Periphery Walk Barcelona (2011). Seven of these drawings are on display. They oscillate between representational sketches and cartographic notes or illustrations, associative measurements of space, and abstract recordings. The photographs show unspectacular places on the city outskirts where the ordinary eye would notice hardly anything worth shooting. The complete exploratory walk drawings and photo-survey is available for consultation at the gallery.
Again this connects with some of Piller’s early series of works, Wanderings through the Periphery of Hamburg (1994-95) that evolved even before his archive, but that already clearly showed the artist ́s interests in forms of documenting and archiving, as well as his predilection for peripheral urban zones.
To complement the exhibition, Peter Piller presents a set of found books that have been selected between him and artist Jochen Lempert and extracted from each other’s libraries. A total of around twenty-five titles, most of them older publications, which do show a quite subjective, somehow eclectic, unpredictable and unfashionable look into a few subjects. Mostly dealing with photographic content, one can find among the books celebrated titles as the Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg; The Uncanny by recently deceased extraordinary artist Mike Kelley, or the rare book by Carl André Quincy book.
*Interarchive. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2002
**Peter Piller. Noch ist nichts zu sehen. Material Verlag. Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, 1998