Peter Vogel

Peter Vogel was born in Freiburg in 1937. After having studied physics at university, he began to work as a researcher. At the same time he began his activity in art after having become interested in painting, dance, choreography, the composition of electronic music, and video. His earliest works, dating from 1955, had an almost abstract expressionist approach.

In 1967 Peter Vogel was greatly impressed by a scientific experiment by the neurophysiologist Grey Walter who used a machinae speculatrix that reacted to impulses from the external world with lights, colours, sounds, and sensors. It was this very interactivity that particularly fascinated Vogel and gave him the necessary inspiration to radically change his formal language. In 1969 the artist made his first plastic/cybernetic experiment and, in 1971, he held his first show in Freiburg.

From then on he exhibited in numerous international shows, such as Les Machines Sentimentales at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1986.

From 1979 to 1984 he resided for long periods in New York. From this time date the Pareti musicali works, a summation of his experiments in the field of music and cybernetics, and which included Minimal Music Klangwand (1988) and Techno-Klangwand (1996). In 1996 he became a professor at the HBK University in Saarbrücken. In 2004 he was awarded the Reinhold-Schneider prize by the city of Freiburg and, in 2008, the Freiburg Museum für Neue Kunst held an important retrospective show of his work.

Peter Vogel died in 2017 in Freiburg.

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