Peter Zimmermann, Schule von Freiburg

The chalky time is over! Peter Zimmermann is one of the outstanding international protagonists of conceptual painting. This is his first major exhibition in his hometown of Freiburg. Zimmermann has radically transformed the rooms in the museum to create a massive, integrated, walk-in work: the floor has become a canvas, the exhibition venue a colossal spatial frieze extending in bright colors across several rooms. The focus of the catalog and exhibition is the confrontation of an epoxy floor piece created on-site especially for the exhibition with a spectacular new series of oil paintings shown here for the first time in its entirety. Since the mid-1980s, Peter Zimmermann has been examining the possibilities of painting. He manipulates documents such as photos, film stills, and diagrams with digital filters and transfers these onto the canvas in several layers of epoxy resin. This results in abstract flowing forms of great visual force. »Freiburg School« is reminiscent not only of the girls' school for which the early 20th century museum building was originally built, but also reflects the artist’s critical attitude to prevalent educational models and forms of communication. Peter Zimmermann focuses on the transformation of a centrally organized dissemination of knowledge right through to crowdsourcing, from encyclopedia to Wikipedia. It is in this context of intensive study of digital media and their impact on contemporary painting that the complex and colorful cosmos of Peter Zimmermann unfolds. Exhibition: Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg, 19/3–19/6/2016