Peter Piller

As an art student in the mid-nineties, Peter Piller (*1968) worked at a Hamburg press agency. His task was to monitor where and in what form adverts commissioned by local clients were being published. Leafing through press publications on a daily basis, Piller began to come across images that particularly caught his attention. Soon he collected them in categories such as Touching the Car, Nothing to See As Yet (Prospective Building Sites), or Girls with Guns. Over the years, the artist collated more than 7,000 images, which he continues to re-arrange and reference in his work.
With the exhibition Document Control, Fotomuseum Winterthur now offers an insight into this monumental archive of images.

Periphery Walks, Winterthur
For the past twenty years, Piller has undertaken what he calls 'periphery walks' – step-by-step explorations of the outskirts of various cities and regions across Europe, from Hamburg and the Ruhr region to Bonn, Graz and Barcelona. Following external cues as well as internal memories, and finishing as soon as he finds his sense of perception waning, he creates a photographic archive which he later complements with drawings from memory. In these 'mental maps', Pillar allows the medium of drawing to supplement that of photography, and vice versa.

While working on a commission for Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2013/2014, Pillar repeatedly visited the area. In this time, he revived a visual childhood passion, creating the series Periphery Walks Winterthur – now presented in the form of an exhibition as well as a book of the same title.

For further information visit Fotomuseum Winterthur