Erika: A Portrait by Peter Peryer

13 July - 16 September 2001 in the Entire Gallery
This exhibition presents images from the one of the most sustained and fascinating episodes of portraiture in New Zealand photography. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, renowned photographer Peter Peryer made numerous emotionally charged images of his wife Erika—the exhibition presents this photographic essay for the first time.

A major survey of Peter Peryer’s career—Second Nature—toured New Zealand and Germany in 1995-1996. Erika concentrates on one facet of Peryer’s multi-faceted career in which Peryer accomodates an expressionist painterly tradition within the traditions of documentary photography. In the vein of international artists such as Edward Weston and Nicholas Nixon who have also focused their camera’s eye on their wives or partners, the images partake of and adapt a much-debated tradition of the female subject as muse and poetic object.

Erika: A Portrait by Peter Peryer is a touring exhibition organised by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.