Lot 711 D

Peter Roehr created all his works during a tragically short period of time, as the artist died shortly after he had turned 24, in summer 1968. Nevertheless his artistic maturity has continued to be imrpessive to the present day. His entire oeuvre is marked by the principle of serial sequencing:
“I always assemble existing items of the same kind. They may be, for instances objects, photos, free shapes such as letters, pieces of text, sounds, noises, film footage, etc. The results are what I call 'assemblies'. don't use organic objects but only designed items, preferably industrially produced objects. [...]
“I arrange these objects without gaps, so as not to obstruct the relationships between them and so that full attention is always focused on the objects themselves.
“If the number of arranged objects exceeds a certain flexible limit, they dissolve and become basic entities with their own specific structure. If the number that is reached is different from this flexible limit, then the items continue to be a mere collection of objects.
“What I fix in my assemblies is the midpoint between an object that can still be experienced as such and an aesthetic structure that has become independent. I believe that each object encapsulates certain tangible properties which we hardly ever perceive. These are qualities which we notice when we perceive the same object lined up several times in succession, either next to one another (in space) or one after the other (in time) and indeed without any gaps in time or space between each of the occurrences. This is because such an arrangement does not lead to non-shapes resulting from the shape of the material.
“The effect is partly due to the fact that the peripheral parts of an object always enter into a relationship with the adjoining or preceding and following objects and that they do so not in the usual way, through the object itself, from within it, but from outside.” (Peter Roehr, From “Notizen zu den Montagen I”, in: Rudi Fuchs (ed.), Peter Roehr, exhib.cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen et al., Cologne 1977, p. 25).