Peter Zimmermann

Life and education

Peter Zimmermann studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart from 1978 to 1983. Since then he has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums both within Germany and abroad. He works as a painter, sculptor and object artist. He was a professor at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne between 2002 and 2007.

Work

Zimmermann's work is extremely diverse. At the end of the 1980s he created his "Book Cover Paintings," in which the covers and titles of atlases, art books, travel guides and dictionaries were represented on canvas using epoxy. Through his cardboard objects he works with the spatial distortion of the written word and thus questions the relationship between text and image. The colourful motives in his epoxy resin images arise from digital templates, such as photos, film stills or diagrams, which he distorts by means of graphical algorithms and transfers onto the canvas in numerous transparent layers of epoxy resin. Since 2014 he has increasingly realised this conceptual approach through the medium of oil painting. Questions concerning the relationship between the original and its depiction as well as an engagement with the concept of the surface lie at the centre of his creative output. Zimmermann's work is to be found in numerous private and public collections, for example the Bundeskunstsammlung in Bonn, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist lives and works in Cologne.

solo exhibitions (selection)

group exhibitions (selection)

Public Collections