PETER ROEHR — THE MESSAGE IS: THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE MATERIAL TOWARDS THE FREQUENCY OF ITS REPETITION

An early love can be a formative experience, and, with a bit of luck, it can last an entire lifetime. This indeed holds true for my relation to Peter Roehr and his art. Our ways had crossed in 1964 at the American advertising agency Young & Rubicam in Frankfurt. In a sense, they have not parted ever since, even though Roehr himself passed away already four years later, at the age of merely twenty-four. Yet his unique artistic work has remained alive: the Peter Roehr Estate, the administration of which has been my task for more than fifty years. 

The latest chapter in the history of this artistic reception is the exhibition The Message Is: The Behaviour of the Material towards the Frequency of its Repetition at the Mehdi Chouakri Gallery in Berlin, which represents the work of Peter Roehr and has shown it on several occasions over the years.

After various experiments, Peter Roehr has found his quasi-axiomatic overall theme in the „unvaried and unbroken repetition of existing, preferably industrially manufactured objects“ in 1962/63. In the following years, he created his Montagen using a large variety of materials, from Typo-Montagen produced with a typewriter, Objekt-Montagen mounted from buttons, hubcaps or postal stickers, or Foto-Montagen from printed advertising copies and so on – all the way down to his Film- and Ton-Montagen…

The current exhibition at Mehdi Chouakri focuses on a lesser-known group of works, the Lege-Montagen from 1964/2013, and is in a way a premiere. 

The creation of the Lege-Montagen: four different objects – key rings, coins, drawing pins, and glass spheres – each laid out in square fields, illuminated in different ways and photographed in black and white. Since they were subsequently dismantled, they exist only in the form of twelve different photo negatives in a format of 6 x 6 centimeters. (I had the pleasure of assisting Peter Roehr in creating these works in 1964 in my Frankfurt apartment). 

After Peter Roehr's untimely death, the said negatives were part of his artistic estate carefully documented in 1968/69. To grant this particular category its deserved presence in the artist's oeuvre, a silver print edition of all twelve motifs was issued in three copies each (plus one editor’s print) in November 2013, supervised, registered and authorized by myself as Roehr’s appointed administrator. I am delighted that this part of Peter Roehr’s oeuvre now also receives its merited prominence with the exhibition at Mehdi Chouakri. 

— Paul Maenz, Berlin in January 2022

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The archive of Peter Roehr, including a complete list of his estate, is in the hands of the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, and can be accessed digitally under: www.archiv-peter-roehr.mmk-frankfurt.de