
Tam um Tag gutter Tag #2563
2010
This intimate oil painting depicts a single empty drinking glass set against a pale, luminous ground, rendered with extraordinary precision and quiet restraint. The cylindrical vessel sits on a reflective surface, casting soft shadows that anchor it gently in space. Light moves across the glass with subtle complexity, revealing the refractive qualities of the thick base, the slight distortions in the transparent walls, and the delicate highlights that trace the rim. The palette is almost achromatic, built from whites, cool grays, and the faintest whispers of blue, creating an atmosphere of meditative stillness that elevates an unremarkable domestic object into something approaching the transcendent. This work belongs to Peter Dreher's monumental ongoing series Tag um Tag guter Tag, begun in 1974 and ultimately comprising thousands of paintings, each depicting the same water glass in the same position, painted from life under consistent conditions. The title, drawn from a Zen koan meaning "Day by day is a good day," signals the philosophical underpinning of the project. For Dreher, the act of returning repeatedly to a single subject is not an exercise in repetition but in attention, a daily meditation on perception, time, and the nature of seeing. Each canvas records a specific moment of looking, accumulating across decades into a sustained inquiry into what it means to truly observe something. Numbered painting 2563, dated 2010, carries within its modest dimensions the weight of that long commitment. Dreher's technical virtuosity is evident in the handling of light and transparency, qualities notoriously difficult to achieve in oil paint, yet the work never feels labored or showy. The small scale, 25 by 20 centimeters, demands that the viewer move close, creating an intimate encounter that mirrors the concentrated attention Dreher himself brings to the subject. Collectors acquiring a work from this series join a conversation about the relationship between art and daily life, between looking and knowing, that places Dreher in dialogue with Morandi's still life practice and Conceptual art's interest in serial repetition. A painting from Tag um Tag guter Tag is at once a finely crafted object, a philosophical statement, and a record of a single human being's devoted attention to the world.
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
🔨 Auction Lot
Martini Studio d'Arte: Modern And Contemporary Art
June 10, 2026
Estimate: €6,000 to €8,000
Lot 125
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