Peter Zimmermann studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart from 1978 to 1983. Since then he has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums both within Germany and abroad. He works as a painter, sculptor and object artist. He was a professor at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne between 2002 and 2007.
Zimmermann’s work is extremely diverse. At the end of the 1980s he created his “Book Cover Paintings,” in which the covers and titles of atlases, art books, travel guides and dictionaries were represented on canvas using epoxy. Zimmermann makes epoxy paintings that explore the visual effects of surface and material through glossy pour-like shapes of rich colors. His amorphous forms prompt endless interpretation, the depth and density of his materials creating visceral effects of shifting light and color, heightened by layered airbrushing. For source materials, Zimmerman repurposes book covers and old paintings, and uses Photoshop filters to manipulate found images from the Internet into unidentifiable abstractions.
Through his cardboard objects he works with the spatial distortion of the written word and thus questions the relationship between text and image. The colourful motives in his epoxy resin images arise from digital templates, such as photos, film stills or diagrams, which he distorts by means of graphical algorithms and transfers onto the canvas in numerous transparent layers of epoxy resin. Since 2014 he has increasingly realised this conceptual approach through the medium of oil painting. Questions concerning the relationship between the original and its depiction as well as an engagement with the concept of the surface lie at the centre of his creative output.

The artist’s pieces may be found in numerous private and public collections, including the Bundeskunstsammlung in Bonn, the MoMA in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the Neue Galerie Graz in Austria, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art.