Peter Zimmermann: Swipe

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.