Peter Zimmermann's Walk-in Art Installation

Peter Zimmermann, Schule von Freiburg. Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg. Photo by Bernhard Strauss © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.

German artist Peter Zimmermann is an exemplary champion of conceptual painting. His work has a rigorous theoretical underpinning and gives rise to paintings of immense visual power. Zimmermann has been exploring the potential of painting ever since the mid-1980s. He is particularly well known for his often large-format paintings which he makes by manipulating digital templates – be they photographs, film stills or diagrams – with the aid of computer programmes and digital filters, duly transferring them onto the canvas in several layers of transparent epoxy resin. This method gives rise to stunningly colourful, abstract paintings.

In his recent solo exhibition ‘Freiburg School’, Zimmermann radically transformed the rooms in the museum to create a single integrated, walk-in work in which the floor become a canvas, the exhibition venue a colossal spatial frieze. The focal point of the exhibition was the place where two distinct groups of works confront one another: the epoxy works on the floor made especially for the exhibition and a series of more recent oil paintings on the walls, which were being shown in this configuration for the first time. Compositionally, the paintings on the walls were made using a similar manipulation process as the works in epoxy.

‘Freiburg School’ revisits the museum’s previous incarnation at the beginning of the twentieth century as a girls’ school. The title also draws on biographical material, but at the same time, the school metaphor refers to everything unknown and still to be learned.