Peter Dreher

Exhibitions

20 September - 24 November 2013

This autumn MK Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Peter Dreher (b.1932), a painter from South West Germany who has produced a daily painting of the same, empty glass for the last 40 years. This remarkable series, of which there are over 5,000 examples, is titled Every Day is a Good Day, taken from a Zen-Buddhist saying that suggests everything is of equal importance.

Dreher’s practice is contemplative, diaristic and obsessive. His work highlights minute changes in our surroundings, deliberately marking the passage of time and ultimately providing evidence of the artist’s existence. His work inevitably recalls the subtle shifts and gradations in Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes as well as the rigorously serialised approaches of Dreher’s contemporaries such as the conceptual artists Hanne Darboven, On Kawara or Roman Opalka.

The exhibition at MK Gallery will be organised in three groups: the Long Gallery will include around 150 of the glass paintings from the 1970s to the present day, as well as related engravings, watercolours and drawings; the Middle Gallery will bring together still lifes, including paintings of flowers, foliage, vegetables, skulls and a large series of detailed and close-up pencil drawings of an aubergine; and the Cube Gallery will feature architectural scenes made up of separate canvases, each of which was painted in a single day.