Peter Dreher at Monique Knowlton

Art in America, July, 1998 by Jonathan Goodman

German artist Peter Dreher is best known for his series "Tag um Tag ist guten Tag" (Day by Day Is a Good Day), which he, began in 1974. Painting the same image -- a glass of water against an unadorned background -- again and again, the artist has now finished close to 3,000 paintings. The nuances of light and shading turn this repetitive act into an inspired gesture in which small distinctions in the color of the glass, in the tiny window reflected in the glass, and in the wall and table become astute comments on physical change and the perception of such change.

In this show, Dreher offered examples of this series, along with two other groups of works. Eight paintings were included from "The Naked Ones," an ongoing project in which he paints nude portraits of female students. The young women are depicted, with a single exception, in full frontal nudity; however, their somber countenances and stolid poses argue against an erotic reading. Instead. a kind of anonymity takes over, whereby the women, like the glasses Dreher paints, demonstrate his interest in variation within unity. Of course, the women are manifestly various in the proportions of their bodies, yet the viewer experiences them serially; similarity, rather than difference, of form is emphasized. Dreher is concerned with the construction of a method that resists the attempt to turn art into metaphor; the women are an invitation to paint rather than gaze upon or interpret.

An untitled 1997 piece consists of 28 equally sized watercolor panels of rhododendrons; Dreher originally conceived of the flowers as a billboard, which he actually had produced. These watercolors were taken from a larger image, cut up in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle, and rearranged. Each panel becomes a work in its own right -- the deep reds and oranges of the blossoms contrast with the dark green of the leaves. The letters of the phrase "einfach so" ("simply so"), which were on the billboard, also have been cut up and distributed randomly among the panels.

This work, like the nudes and glasses, owes its formal interest to a disinterested choice on the artist's part. For each of these three projects Dreher has worked out a conceptual method that turns an arbitrary decision into a procedure capable of producing art that engages both the eye and the intellect.