Subtle Humour

• Peter Piller, from the series ‘Unsolved Cases’, Peter Piller Archive, 2006
  Courtesy of the Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
• Peter Piller, from the series ‘Unsolved Cases’, Peter Piller Archive, 2006
  Courtesy of the Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
• Peter Piller, from the series ‘Unsolved Cases’, Peter Piller Archive, 2006
  Courtesy of the Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
• Peter Piller, from the series ‘Unsolved Cases’, Peter Piller Archive, 2006
  Courtesy of the Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023

Through to May 21, 2023, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf presents an exhibition of works by Peter Piller - becoming the first venue in the Rhineland region to dedicate a comprehensive survey to the oeuvre of the German artist, who has also been a lecturer at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts since 2018.

Ever since his student days in Hamburg, Piller (b. 1968) has been collecting visual materials from existing sources (ranging from newspapers and postcards to aerial images and the internet) and re-contextualising them in the form of thematic series. Today, the Peter Piller Archive comprises thousands of meticulously categorised images. The artist’s primary tool is his keen sense of observation and subtle humour, which enables him to detect shared or curious elements in seemingly trivial depictions, and place them in relationship with each other.

This has resulted, for example, in a sub-archive comprising 20,000 aerial photographs (sectioned into 23 series), which Piller started in 2002. His own drawings and photographs, too, always adhere to a serial concept. For his ‘Periphery Walks’ series, for example – whose beginnings date back to 1994 – the artist walked the circumference of cities such as Hamburg, Barcelona and Bonn, documenting his journey in drawings and photographs for an arbitrary yet illuminating snapshot of contemporary life in Central Europe.  

The exhibition, which is accompanied by a book of the same title, takes place as part of the 250-year anniversary of the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts. It was curated by Gregor Jansen and Alicia Holthausen in close collaboration with the artist.