Peter ZimmermannSwipe

Rarely has the study of sources been so amusing, and the work of Peter Zimmermann is diverse. At the end of the 1980s the so-called Book Cover Paintings dominated – the Cologne artist painted the covers of atlases, art books, travel guides and dictionaries onto canvas in epoxy resin. In his cardboard objects he then worked with spatial distortions of writing and image, addressing loops and their interactions. This was followed by the successful series of splendidly colourful, gleaming canvases with pure abstract painting of forms, for which the artist first alienated digital templates, photographs, film stills or diagrams by means of graphic algorithms and then applied them in numerous transparent layers of epoxy resin. Since 2014, true to this approach, Peter Zimmermann has increasingly turned to oil painting again, creating surging seas full of tentacles and bathed in luminous colours. For the new 2023 volume of the Kienbaum Artists’ Books, entitled “swipe,” the artist has now rummaged through his store of material and condensed his sources as well as his works into a wild potpourri. The analogies that come to light in the process are indications of a profound engagement with the relationship between original and image and with the concept of the surface. But rarely has a self-taught study of sources been so amusing.