Peter Zimmermann

Peter Zimmermann, born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1956, is a German painter, sculptor, and academic. He completed his art education at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart between 1978 and 1983. Throughout his career, he has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and internationally, and served as a professor at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 2002 to 2007. Zimmermann's art gained prominence with his "Book Cover Paintings," which he began in the late 1980s. In these works, he transferred the covers of atlases, art books, travel guides, and dictionaries onto canvas using epoxy resin. He also explored the spatial distortion of text through cardboard objects, questioning the relationship between text and image. The artist's colorful and glossy resin paintings are inspired by digital templates such as digital photographs, film stills, or diagrams. He transforms these templates with graphic algorithms and transfers them onto canvas in transparent epoxy layers. Since 2014, he has continued this conceptual approach with oil paintings. Peter Zimmermann's works are held in prestigious collections such as the Federal Art Collection in Bonn, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist continues to live and work in Cologne.