The brightness of colour, shine and vibrating forms capture the senses and at first glance seem irresistibly, perhaps even dangerously, beautiful. It takes time to wise up to the picture because we are dealing with more than just a harmonious composition, and there is certainly a complex interaction of concept, picture discovery and the mechanism of production behind it. This is because the work that we encounter here as a quasi-classical panel picture is really a multi-stage media art work.

The basis for Zimmermann’s series of synthetic resin pictures is an archive of repeatedly re-worked digital images, scans of his own work or picture material from television or the Internet. Peter Zimmermann re-works this “found footage” in the computer, lays filters over it, abstracts the visual material in order to transform it into a painting in a complex and costly casting process. The synthetic resin, enriched with colour pigment, can change depending on the length of production time. The coincidental nature of the form has less to do with a spontaneous gesture than with the physical qualities of the material itself.

The questions as to the handling of the profusion of image material from the media are an essential aspect. According to Jens Schröter Zimmermann’s work concerns “the (totalitarian?) expansion of digitalisation together with the dislocation of pictorial reality caused by this take-over, secondly the problems concerning the logic of the filter and, finally, the problems concerning the logic of selection from a digital archive into signs belonging to a media revolution”.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)