6 Minutes @ Peter Zimmermann

Peter Zimmermann borrows the knowledge of old masters like Cranach and Dürer in superimposing layers of paint to provide a subtly transparent effect. Oil painting is replaced here by epoxy resin in which acrylic pigments are randomly inserted. Zimmermann also reinvents Action Painting, giving it a post-modern twist. Zimmermann's latest exhibition in Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong themed <D.R.O.P.>, mylifestylenews met the artist to find out his world of colors......

From 1987 to 1997, he has for some time subjected the world of art and society in general to a critical semiological reading through art book or philosophy enlarged cover paintings and fictional publicity stands. Thanks to computer tools and dithering, the artist deforms visuals, texts and signs coming from his own inventory of sundry images that recall the atlases of Gerhard Richter and Warburg. 

The digital files obtained in this way, which are the matrices of his future paintings, are subsequently transfigured. Zimmermann’s «tactile» paintings possess a luminosity and unique internal sensuality issuing from a complex technique.

By enlarging the book's covers way beyond their original easy to handle sizes, he emphasized that their contents were visually included in the typography and the design of their cover; proposing that text can be read as an image and an image can be read as text, questioning the notions if language and representation.

He chose books which were typical reference books such as dictionaries, travel guides, art titles, publications of visual theory, monographs on abstract painters etc, nooks that are commonly accepted as being objective point of reference in their respective fields and assumed as authoritative source of knowledge for understanding and interpreting contemporary culture, its visual mapping and its intellectual identity.

By extracting the covers and morphing them into paintings, thus using them as a personal subject matter for his art masking, his proposition comes to the realization that art is to be always read within a context.

His strategy engaged with the questioning if popular concepts and critical issues, and the re-evaluation of the perfection of the position of the artists, and the position of artistic institutions within art history.

The abstract motifs that have been present in his works since the end of the 1990s spring paradoxically from figurative representations. 

There are huge collection of material I used, photos, diagrams of my own work to re-process until I projected on canvas and use it as a basis for painting.

Imperfection is a big field and something very precious and it doesn't happen too often. Sometimes it may be not accepted but as it can also be considered as a gift when it happens and find the reject way to deliver.

There is no special message from my work to be delivered, I can't go into the audience's brain and I open to every interpretation. It is more like a communication process.

I like colors and yet I try to avoid to make too much of color's choice. I don't change the color of its origin.

In the old times, people got to go out to the nature to paint and now people get in touch with technology and I make the mortification process from within.

Zimmermann's works have been exhibited in numerous international exhibitions, including the Foundation Bruxelles in Belgium, Kunsthalle Nürnberg in Nuremburg in Germany, the 2007 Moscow Biennale, the 1999 Liverpool Biennale in England, and 1993 Venice Biennial in Italy, among others. They belong to the most important Public Collections : Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France ; Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, France ; Centre Georges Pompidou (Amis du musée national d’Art moderne), Paris, France ; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France ; Museum Moderner Kunst, Frankfurt/Main, Germany ; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany ; Museion, Bolzano, Italy ; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA ; New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, New Orleans, USA ; Museum of Modern Art, New York ; USA, New York Public Library, New York, USA ; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, USA etc.

mylifestylenews @ Peter Zimmermann