Bernd Zimmer
Galerie Karl Pfefferle, Munich, Germany
Bernd Zimmer, Wie ein Schatten im Wasser (Like a shadow in the water, 2009)
Over the ages the story of Narcissus, staring rapt into a pool, has been assiduously mined by writers and artists, philosophers and psychiatrists. A recent evocation of the myth can be found at Bernd Zimmer’s exhibition of new work at Galerie Karl Pfefferle. This is implicit, however, as the German artist’s mostly large-scale acrylic paintings are completely devoid of the figure. In its stead is the set design that Narcissus made so famous: the dappled glen, the reflecting pool, the near-perfect symmetry between the world above and the world below. In Zimmer’s regularly toxic, nearly fluorescent palette the greens, yellows and indigos are almost DayGlo in their brilliance, while the attenuated lines of trees, both real and reflected, pop like fireworks. The effect is to take a landscape that is general in its evocation of the sublime and the psychological, and to transform it into some strange acid other. To that end, the landscapes appear to be studies of their own formal characteristics – an approach that seems very much in keeping with the myth of Narcissus itself.
Many of Zimmer’s nine deftly illumined paintings have a dreamy, watery feel. Acrylic has been applied to the canvases in long, thin streaks to suggest the silhouettes of trees, or in diaphanous, puddle-like shapes that evoke light and water. The horizon lines are situated irregularly, offering sharply different focal points: the pool in some canvases, the forest in others. In Durchsicht über dem Sumpf (The view over the swamps, 2009) the horizon line is roughly central, and willowy, dark violet trees stretch away on both sides like stilts. In the brashly verdant Erleuchtete Bäume (Enlightened trees, 2008), Zimmer pushes the horizon down, and an acid-green orchestra of trees rises up to a pool of light breaking the tree line. In both paintings, the reflections are not quite perfect: scrims of light and shadow blur the water’s surface, inviting a welcome abstraction into the mix. In two of the smaller paintings on view, Zimmer takes a tighter focus and more abstract air, a mode that yields the best works in the show.
Spiegel der Ufer (Mirror of the shore, 2009)
In Spiegel der Ufer (Mirror of the shore, 2009), the reflecting pool predominates. Against the grassy yellow of the painting, spindly trees grow from a horizon line that skates across the top of the canvas. Below, a dark watery shape – a kind of blurred, imperfect circle – situates itself in the centre of the painting. Although evocative of a reflected moon, the shape is loose enough to also suggest one of Georg Baselitz’s upside-down floating heads. In the more abstract Wie ein Schatten im Wasser (Like a shadow in the water, 2009), the shadowy circle recurs, but here it could be a rock breaking the pool’s reflection, as drips and streaks and puddles of paint splash out against the mirrored landscape, above and below. Perhaps the furthest move into abstraction comes from Schatten schimmern im See (Shadows shimmering in the lake, 2008), which – with its spectral smattering of star-like drips and its blocky, scraped surfaces – recalls both Zimmer’s ‘Cosmos’ series of paintings (1998–2006), and Gerhard Richter’s seminal ‘squeegee abstractions’ that the painter began making in the late ’80s.
Born in Southern Germany in 1948, Zimmer came to prominence in the early ’80s alongside the Berlin-based part of the Junge Wilde (Wild youth) group. The larger German movement in painting also encompassed, among others, artists as various as Albert Oehlen, Daniel Nagel, A. R. Penck and Salomé. From those neo-expressionistic beginnings, Zimmer has long focused his attention on the natural world, exacting a metaphysical charge from its landscapes and sky spaces. (The artist’s landscapes are pointedly painted from memory; the cool conceptualism of painting from photographs is definitely not for him.) Where Zimmer’s work succeeds is in its moving away from the overly familiar beauty of its subject into more subjective, more abstracted territory – a concern that the exhibition’s title, ‘Second Nature’, speaks to. While the phrase often denotes a habit so fluent it is done unconsciously, it also suggests a ‘second’ nature; one that is not quite the original. Like the reflections in his pools, Zimmer’s ‘nature’ is at once familiar and elusive, ‘natural’ and adroitly, bracingly artificial.
Quinn Latimer
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