Roehr, Peter

Painter, object artist

born: 01.09.1944 in Lauenburg (Pomerania)

died: 15.08.1968 in Frankfurt am Main

Roehr moved to Frankfurt am Main with his mother in 1956 and learned the trade of a neon sign and sign maker. From 1962 to 1965, he studied at the Werkkunstschule Wiesbaden and, after graduating, completed a further semester as a master student in the painting class.

Initially, Roehr produced material pictures, for example from matchboxes arranged in a grid or from rice, scattered on wood and painted over in white. He called his works "montages", which were not intended to present a composition, but a monotonous structure of order committed to repetition. From 1963, the first "text montages" were created from letters or sentences; industrial products, photos, film and sound sequences also found their way into Roehr's works. The artist friendship with Charlotte Posenenske led to their joint decision in 1968 to stop working as artists. At the beginning of the year, Roehr and his patron and gallery owner Paul Maenz opened the pop and underground store "Pudding Explosion" in Frankfurt as a subversive and playful response to the current political discourse.

Although hardly noticed during his lifetime, Roehr's work was honored as early as 1971 in a retrospective at Museum Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen. This was followed by several solo exhibitions abroad and a comprehensive presentation at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt in 2009. In the FLUXUS anniversary year 2012, the Kunsthaus Wiesbaden showed works by Roehr and Posenenske as further trend-setting positions of the 1960s.