Peter Dreher: Tag um Tag Guter Tag #1638, 1998
Current exhibition
Installation Views
Overview
German artist Peter Dreher painted the same drinking glass every day from 1974-2014, amassing over 5,000 ten-inch by 8-inch paintings of a life-size water glass atop a table at different times of day. He titled the series “Tag um Tag Guter Tag,” a translation of the Zen Buddhist expression “Day by Day, Good Day.” With unwavering patience, his commitment to the repetition of this practice was both the same and deeply different every day: the minute details of light, shadow, and reflection could never be precisely the same. Working outside the dominant movements of his time, Dreher developed a singular practice grounded in realism, routine, and reverence for the ordinary.
Born in Mannheim, Germany in 1932, Dreher studied at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe and later taught painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, Freiburg, to artists including Anselm Kiefer and Wolfgang Laib. Beginning in the 1990s, Dreher would visit San Diego periodically, forming an affinity with a place opposite from postwar Germany, as well as a longstanding relationship with Mark Quint and Quint Gallery. In addition to his daily water glass paintings and landscapes, he is also known for his Beachcomber Shores series, a set of 52 paintings depicting a panoramic view of the surfer motel room he requested Mark to put him up in during each visit to San Diego. Solo presentations of his work have been at institutions internationally, including the Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2022), and previously at the Milton Keynes Museum, Great Britain (2013); Landesvertretung Baden-Würtemberg, Berlin (2012); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, (2011), Museum Erfurt, Germany (2008); Athens Biennial (2007) and Staatliche Kunsthalle (Baden-Baden) (1977). Dreher passed in 2020 in Berlin, Germany.
Selected Works
