Seeing With Your Eyes: The Photographs of Peter Dressler 1972 – 2003
Gallery 11st Apr 2016 to 13th May 2016
About The Exhibition
Peter Dressler (b.1942) is an Austrian photographer whose work has been gaining international prominence since his death in 2013. Working in partnership with Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Belfast Exposed will present the first major solo exhibition of the artist's work in Ireland.
Dressler’s performance-based, staged photographic series’ involve temporary and often humorous interventions into a range of public and private spaces and everyday urban situations. Within each series Dressler himself adopts the identity of a subject closely observed from his environment; a conscientious museum attendant, a bored aristocrat, a frustrated businessman on a sales trip etc. Using sets, costumes and props Dressler creates a rich visual language and builds complex layers of narrative around each subject. By doing so he plays with the relationship between photographer and subject and probes the nature of the human condition through his character’s familiar and often irrational responses to a variety of environments and contexts.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication written by curator Margit Zuckriegl and translated by Lisa Rosenblatt.
The Artists
Peter Dressler
Peter Dressler (1942-2013) lived and worked in Vienna, Austria. He studied painting from 1966 to 1971 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Gustav Hessing and taught at the same academy from 1972 – 2008. He has been exhibited by Camera Austria and Fotohof, Salzburg, among others. He is published by Fotohof and over 200 of his photographs are held in the collection of the Ministry for Education, Art and Culture in Vienna. He was awarded the Rupertinum Photo Prize (Salzburg, Austria) in 2001: the Higashikawa Prize (photo festival Higashikawa, Japan) in 2011; and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Artistic Photography (Vienna, Austria) in 2013.
Acknowledgements
This exhibition has been generously supported by Federal Chancellery of Austria (BKA), Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council. We would like to thank our partners Museum der Moderne Salzburg, curator Margit Zuckriegl and translator Lisa Rosenblatt.