VIDEO: Peter Wächtler-Between Precision and Play

In this interview, the artist Peter Wächtler shares insights into his creative process, which involves experimentation, humor, and deconstruction. Peter Wächtler embraces trial and error, allowing the unpredictability of materials and techniques to guide his artistic process. He works in various media, including drawing, sculpture, video, and writing. “I work with these over narrative formats. I’m interested in comforting or discomforting narrations, educational narrations, like illustrations for school books or for historical books.”
Wächtler’s art is characterized by its narrative quality. He frequently depicts animated states of animals or human figures. He draws inspiration from everyday life, bourgeois domesticity, and labor, creating works that mix humor and pathos.

“I always wanted to be more in a reactive state and not in a planned state.”
Wächtler’s studio is a space of constant experimentation. He shares his techniques for creating watercolor and chalk drawings, often layering oil and other materials to achieve a unique texture and depth. His process involves embracing the unpredictability of art. “It’s almost like deconstructing more than putting things together,” he explains, highlighting his fascination with the interplay of structure and chaos.

“I like to emphasize the silence of sculpture.” Peter Wächtler describes how sculpture naturally possesses a quiet, enduring quality – a “gravestone DNA” which he contrasts by shaping sculptures in the form of sound amplifiers.

Peter Wächtler, born in 1979 in Hannover, Germany, is an artist living and working in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Simian, Copenhagen; Culturgest, Lisbon; dépendance, Brussels; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York City; The Power Station, Dallas; Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen; Foundation Antonio Dalle Nogare, Bolzano, and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin.

 

Peter Wächtler was interviewed by Signe Boe at the Danish Art Workshops in Copenhagen in September 2024.Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan, Edited and Produced by: Signe Boe, Editor-in-Chief: Marc-Christoph Wagner, © Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024 Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling