showcase
Peter Dressler
Spannungsunterbrechung

An elegantly dressed gentleman in a suit dismantles all the furnishings from a posh ‘business class’ hotel room and packs them into a suitcase. The same man reappears, this time dressed in a dressing gown, white shirt, bow tie and tuxedo shoes, on a large green tennis court during a ‘tie break’ at the Semper Depot in Vienna. As so often, Peter Dressler's poetic observations focus on the artist as the sole performer in spaces that dominate the scene. In his conceptual works, the photographer is not concerned with a self-indulgent unfolding of his different personality traits, nor with acting out emotional states. No, Peter Dressler loves to describe events and dissect human behaviour. First and foremost, he is his own actor and, for pragmatic reasons, closest to himself.

Peter Dressler prefers to capture powerful short narratives in serial image sequences, as in his current series ‘Changement de Propriétaire’, which is set in Paris and features subjects from modern photography. He describes his photography as fixed film, which has the advantage of lingering on details. This gives rise to originality and a special form of humour: the paused story, which would be too short for film and literature, opens up a temporal form in photography that brackets the moment between a before and an after and elevates it from the still image into the bizarre and absurd. Thus, in the images that cannot run away, neuroses of everyday life and exaggerated forms of appropriation develop. Dressler's images always have a pleasant slowness; they satirise, as in ‘Business Class’, the casual sins of petty bourgeois manners and, as in ‘Tie Break’ – a duel with oneself – reveal the self-referentiality and melancholy of modern man trapped within the walls of his own self.

Peter Dressler was born in Kronstadt in 1942. He lives and works in Vienna.