Peter Zimmermann: Swipe Kienbaum Artists’ Books 2023 Edition

There are many facets to Peter Zimmermann’ s work. At the end of the 1980s, the so-called Book Cover Paintings dominated – the Cologne artist painted book titles of atlases, art books, travel guides, and dictionaries with epoxy on canvases. In his cardboard objects, he then worked with spatial distortions of text and image, focusing on loops andvtheir reciprocal effects. These were followed by the successful series of vibrantly colored shiny canvases of pure abstract form painting, in which the artist first altered digital templates, photos, film stills, and diagrams using graphic algorithms and then applied them in numerous transparent layers of epoxy resin. Since 2014, in keeping with this approach, Peter Zimmermann has increasingly returned to oil painting, creating billowing oceans full of tentacles bathed in vibrant colors. For the new 2023 volume of Kienbaum Artists’ Books entitled “ Swipe” , the artist has now combed through his collection and consolidated his sources as well as his works into a wild potpourri. The analogies that come to light are indications of a profound examination of the relationship between original and copy, and of the very notion of surface. Rarely, though, has an autodidactic study of sources also been so amusing.

The Kienbaum Collection, which has been collated by Jochen Kienbaum since the 1970s, comprises around 1,500 works of contemporary art, including paintings, sculptures, objects and works on paper. Under the terms Color and Abstraction, the collection brings together works of European and American artists. The collection focuses on the artists Gü nther Fö rg, Bernard Frize, Imi Knoebel, Fabiá n Marcaccio, Richard Allan Morris, Carl Ostendarp, David Reed and Jorinde Voigt. Peter Zimmermann (b. 1956 in Freiburg) studied at the Stuttgart Art Academy from 1978 to 1983 and has since had numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums in Germany and abroad. He works as a painter, sculptor and object artist. From 2002 to 2007 he was a professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Zimmermann’ s works are extremely diverse. Artists’ publications, from which the edition of the Kienbaum Artists’ Books, edited by Jochen and Laura Kienbaum, also originates, form one particular focus area of the collection. The collection is presented to the public through loans to museums and thematic exhibition projects within the company headquarters and at external cooperation partners.