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Peter Roehr

Field Pulsations

Peter Roehr, who died tragically young in 1968 at the age of 24, left behind an astonishingly lively oeuvre.

For decades, Peter Roehr's art has constantly updated itself in line with the latest artistic developments. From the perspective of the Sixties, it appeared to be a German variant of Pop Art, whereas the Seventies saw Roehr's structural aesthetic primarily in terms of its minimalist-conceptual aspect. The consumer-oriented Eighties in turn discovered in Roehr's commodity aesthetics the current appropriation effect, which celebrated international success under the name Appropriation Art, while the Nineties finally recognised the Frankfurt artist's concept of art extended into social areas. The fact that Roehr emphasises not least the contextuality of all art is another central theme of the following generation of artists.

By rejecting every romantic expectation of art, Peter Roehr, as a loner, developed the prerequisite for an art that no longer represents or interprets, but rather factually names its object. By 1963, he had already arrived at his fundamental principle of the serial, unvaried arrangement of industrially produced, identical materials and thematised their aesthetic qualities and their visualisation. In doing so, Roehr turned away from any reference outside the work and at a very early stage adopted a position comparable to those American artists who would later be summarised under the term Minimal and Conceptual Art.

At the same time, Roehr also applied his montage technique to typographic elements such as found numbers, words and texts and, as a forerunner of multimedia art, also experimented with photo, film and sound sequences. His photo montages in particular reflect advertising as a modern environmental aesthetic. It is no longer the iconographic or functional meaning of the individual element that is important, but the specific characteristics and how they are revealed in the repetition: The sequencing enables a new, surprising view of the supposedly familiar elements used in the construction of a structure that is alien to reality.

— Gerda Wendermann

Photos © Marjorie Brunet Plaza