Peter Piller

Peter Piller constructs his work collecting photographic images culled from print and digital media. Piller´s world map as a pictorial archive devotes itself to immediate proximity. For years now he has been engaged in a collection conducted off the beaten track but rooted ultimately in the familiar and trivial. He has created his own “Archive” which is now consisting of thousands of clipped out photographs. As Peter Piller himself stated: “I originally went in search of the non-picture, the picture with no intention or function. I discovered photos in regional newspapers that came astonishingly close to what I was looking for (...). Piller systematically collects and classifies his images according to aspects that may be poetic but may also underscore the utter absurdity of everyday life. People, things and locations are combined into the short stories that are written by life.

For his second solo show at ProjecteSD, Peter Piller has chosen to present for the first time a new series from his newspaper archive: Arrows. The installation brings together 37 pictures of different formats, colour and black & white, all showing “arrows”. Arrows are symbols commonly seen on local German newspapers used by editors to underline supposedly interesting features on the image illustrating the news. As Piller puts it: “our understanding of newspaper photographs is helpless without subtitles, the “arrow” itself is a hint for something meaningful, a criminal scene, something lost, it is the proof that the picture does not work by itself. The arrow-pictures are a good example of the overvalue of photographs. Arrows point out a place, sometimes nowhere, more often they point at themselves. This sort of misundertanding is what interests me”. In “Arrows” it is shown that Piller´s field of work is not only the pictures themselves but rather the connotations, the narrative conventions, i.e. the accompanying symbols, that also describe the picture as a kind of cultural text. This is the real "target" of Peter Piller' interventions. Freed of their original purpose and context the images initially seem to be devoid of meaning, but new meanings and unusual relationships are brought to light, after the artist´s view. The images are displayed in a compact structure that sets the stage for an open dialogue and constantly spurs the viewer to explore the potential of new connections. An encyclopaedia of contemporary life, full of astute observations, gravity, wit, irony and profound significance. As Manisha Jothady wrote in an article for Camera Austria: “Hans Belting writes that pictures in general encourage us to aspire to the freedom and autonomy that we only have in our imagination, and then, that ”For pictures are only what we do with them or see in them.” None other than Peter Piller could demonstrate this fact to us with such urgency.

Peter Piller (Fritzlar, 1968) was awarded the Ars Viva Prize and received the Rubens Prize from the City of Siegen in 2004. His work has been shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen (2004), the Witte de With Rotterdam (2005), and many other European art centers and museums. Last June he received the Baloise Art Prize in Basel, for the installation “Unsolved cases”, presented by Frehrking Wiesehöfer gallery. His work is part of important public and private collections and currently on view at the following venues: CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Kunstfondskunstraum, Bonn (Germany), Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (Germany) and in group shows in Layr:Wuestenhagen Contemporary, Vienna (Austria), Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Galerie Sfeir Semler, Beirut (Lebanon).

The new series presented in the show is compiled in the book Band 9 “Pfeil”, published by Revolver-Verlag.

Peter Piller
Pfeile/Arrows