Peter Zimmermann is internationally renowned as an outstanding exponent of conceptual painting. Appropriating images drawn from the internet along with other found images or film-stills as templates, he digitally manipulates, projects and then pours radiantly coloured resin in cumulative strata across the canvas surface. Initially using recognisable details to keep the partial integrity of the original, more recently the visual origins of the images are completely concealed and transformed into high-gloss, amorphous arcs of shifting light and colour.
When hung together in close proximity, the sense of edge and depth, of limits and definition merge to saturate the gallery space with multidimensional planes that are at once visceral and precise. Sometimes recalling references from formal abstraction and the dreamlike ebb and flow of 1970s psychedelia along with the seductive jewel-like glow of the high-resolution plasma screens, their interpretation is intended to be entirely open-ended as Zimmermann explains,
“I believe the recognition of the painting is not decisive for the enjoyment of the painted image. The laid track must be enough. I find the processes of enlightenment, blurring and mystification, which are a decisive part of the work process, much more exciting. For the viewer, it can be a pleasure to reverse the process of misunderstanding and to decipher the traces of the machinery that melts the whole thing and make it visible again''. - Peter Zimmermann
Peter Zimmermann (b. 1956 Freiburg, Germany) graduated from the Staatliche Akademieder Bildenden Künstein Stuttgart in 1984. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum für neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany and the Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, Germany. Zimmermann's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Neue Galerie Graz in Austria; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris; and the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, among others.
He lives and works in Cologne, Germany.
MARCUS RITTER
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