Peter Dressler

About

First photographic works were created in the 1960s. Vienna as Dressler saw it back then was a city in which “the magic of the commonplace was all around”. According to Peter Dressler, the “realism of the seventies” soon gave way to a different method; photography focussed on perceiving was replaced by photography focussed on feeling. He put this into practice in the form of tableaus and serial picture sequences. By placing the “world of things” into a scenario he continued this type of work and pursued his idea of photographic sequences, similar to those in films, in numerous series – including artist books – in which he himself acts as a protagonist from the 1990s onwards. “I am the actor of my own screenplay“, he said in August 2011 when he received the Higashikawa Award. With his powerful humour he brought life to found and imagined scenarios and articulated art-historical and social correlations as well as human behaviours.

Peter Dressler was born in 1941 in the Romanian town of Brașov/Kronstadt. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he subsequently worked as assistant professor for painting (1972 –2008) in the master class of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The exhibition at KUNST HAUS WIEN is the first retrospective on Peter Dressler since the artist’s death in September 2013.

Curated by Rainer Iqlar and Christine Frisinghelli.