A painter, sculptor, object artist, and university professor, Zimmermann is now known for paintings that explore the visual effects of surface and material through glossy, pour-like shapes in rich colors.

Text and Photos Provided by Modeka Art
February 15, 2023

Peter 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. 

Zimmermann makes epoxy paintings that explore the visual effects of surface and material through glossy, pour-like shapes in rich colors. His amorphous forms prompt endless interpretation—the depth and density of his materials create visceral effects of shifting light and color, heightened by layered airbrushing.

For source materials, Zimmerman repurposes book covers and old paintings and uses Photoshop filters to manipulate found images from the Internet into unidentifiable abstractions.

Through his cardboard objects, he works with the spatial distortion of the written word, and thus questions the relationship between text and image. The colorful 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 realized 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 center of his creative output.

A painter, sculptor, object artist, and university professor, Zimmermann was born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1956. He 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 in Cologne between 2002 and 2007.

Zimmermann’s work can be found in numerous private and public collections, for example, the Bundeskunstsammlung in Bonn, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist lives and works in Cologne.