Peter Zimmermann - Art as Concept

Peter Zimmermann, as Duchamp would have said, is “a painting artist”. Painting is his means, medium and concept. His pictures make the relation of the image to the structure and perception of images their theme, the referential function of the image within a socially and historically determined situation. In the past ten years the artist has built up a digital archive from whose stock he has developed the motifs of not only his large-format pictures, but also his textile printings, objects and spatial installations. [1] Using standardized graphics software, he adapts images of objects, diagrams, structures, television pictures and much more that he has found mainly in the global data world of the Internet. He then converts the visual data, which has often been altered beyond recognition, into epoxy resin paintings, whose seductively shiny surfaces and seemingly “abstract composition” allow inferences only in exceptional cases about the applied models and genesis of the pictures. The impossibility of tracing the process of making from the finished product – that is, the visual “un-conditionedness” of the highly aesthetic epoxy pictures – constitutes the chief difference from the works of the late 1980s and 1990s, the period when Zimmermann began his conceptual work on images. Back then it was especially the referential function that was at the center of his attention, and his work aimed at a context-specific broaching of the subject of the production and reception of art within the operating system of art, and at the investigation of the ideological and manipulative implications of the image. This group of works, which is committed to context art [2] in the strictest sense of the term, is today in the possession of the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg.

The Coverbilder, in which Zimmerman chose the cover designs of exhibition catalogues or monographs on artists as the starting-point for his large-format pictures, pose the question about the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”. [3] Whether he presents a picture by Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian or (the artist most frequently to be met with in Zimmermann’s work) Jackson Pollock, at the focus of attention is not the artwork itself but rather the audience-grabbing marketing of the heroes of twentieth century art. The fascinating thing is that Zimmerman succeeds in making “visible” a multi-layered process the beginning and end of which is only apparently the “same” picture (as motif). In preparing a book, the publisher sets little value on the original picture, since he usually selects only the available pictures of a motif (as images or copies) to decorate the cover. The demands made on the picture (as reproduction) are of a practical, strategic and advertising nature: “suitable” format, good quality of the setting copy, high incentive to buy, logo effect of the “brand”, etc. Zimmerman then uses the result of these decisions (and compromises), in the form of the mass-produced cover, as a model that he enlarges true to scale and transfers down to the last detail with epoxy resin onto canvas. Despite the return into the medium of painting, the result is not a “repetition” or “counterfeit” of the original. Apart from the fact that Zimmerman’s use of epoxy (the high-gloss, industrial surfaces of which would have disconcerted the original artists) clearly distinguishes his pictures from the historical artworks, the “cover-specific” extras ensure the bewilderment of the viewer and the directing of his attention to the concept. [...]

[1] On Zimmermann’s method, cf. Margrit Brehm, “The Reflection of Surfaces”, in: Axel Heil and Wolfgang Schoppmann (eds.), Peter Zimmermann. Epoxiology, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2006, (no page number).
[2] On context art, cf. Peter Weibel (ed.), Kontext Kunst, DuMont, Cologne, 1994.
[3] Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, (first published in 1936), Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1977.

Catalog excerpt "Extended. Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg"
Editors: Lutz Casper, Gregor Jansen, published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2009


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Works in the Exhibition