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10/12/2004

Peter Zimmermann

20.21 Galerie Edition Kunsthandel, Essen

Malerei

The seductive power of Peter Zimmermann's paintings is due to their colours' intensity and their surfaces' purity as well as to the sensual way the coloured material is spread out on the picture carrier. Weightless and without any commitments to mimetic conceptions the free forms seem to hover through the picture, while the painting as such neither disguises its materiality, nor its artificiality - the concrete planned (and by no means contingent) order it is based on.

The starting point for Peter Zimmermann's 'research of visual condition', as his conceptual substantiated research in painting can be called, creates a very heterogenic fund of motifs: statistics and illustrations, as well as covers of art catalogues or images of fish bait, television pictures, own and other's paintings are collected in the artist's computer archive. Working with a picture for him always starts on a digital level. By the use of graphic editing programmes he alters the files until he is fully satisfied with the results. This 'virtual' image is transferred into painting. Depending on their size and complexity, surfaces are defined directly or by the help of punching foils, in which the mixtures of colour pigments and resin are poured in a lengthy process.

The pictures' genesis therefore is in several respects a transformation process. On a strictly formal level it is the motifs - which are often so massively altered that they hardly show any traces of their origins - and the change of media, which constitute the basic difference between model and final painting. According to the content the transformation takes place on several levels at the same time: In the beginning there are images with a concrete referential function. Independent from the difference in content (which is also manifested in a certain organisation principle, that arranges the files on the artist's computer), all archived images are based on files of the same generic structured character. The artist takes this uniformity of medial vocabulary serious and makes it the starting point for his reflection on the contemporary concept of 'picture'. When he shows the possibility to treat both, a reproduction of one of Jackson Pollock's paintings and a diagram of population in a poor state, in the same technical manner on screen, he refers to the loss of reality created by omnipresent medial pictures and habitually applied techniques. As long as the pictures only appear on screen, they remain 'in a state of flux' - which means, they only have a temporal appearance and can be object to further alterations. Paintings that are produced after virtual images therefore embody a cut in time. A certain state is fixed, a virtual picture becomes a real object. After their arrival in the same reality as the viewer, sharing a room with him, Peter Zimmerman's paintings are affirmations of a state of actual existence; they take a look on the old problem of fact and illusion from a new perspective.

Opening hours:
Tue-Fri 10 am - 6 pm
Sa 11 am - 4 pm

20.21 Galerie Edition Kunsthandel GmbH
Meisenburgstraße 169 - 173
45133 Essen

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