Acrylic on paper on canvas. 1990. Signed lower left and dated "B. Zimmer '90'". Dimensions image approx 70*100 cm. Dimensions frame ca 82,5*112,5 cm. Pinholes in upper corners, unobtrusive crease in upper left corner, in excellent original condition.
Provenance: Galerie Delta, Rotterdam.
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Biography
Bernd Zimmer goes to live in Berlin in 1973, he starts working for a publisher and also begins studying philosophy in the same year. He lives in a factory building in Kreuzberg, where Karl Horst Hödicke has a studio. As an artist, Hödicke opposes the informal art that is booming after the war. A new figurative style of painting emerges in the late 1970s, while many art critics had assumed that the development was toward general abstraction. Politics and improving the world played no role among these artists; they wanted to paint and exhibit together but did not speak out on political or social issues. A new art era emerged: Die heftige Malerei der Achtziger. Berlin was an important place for art at that time. A Western city in the Eastern Bloc that attracted many young and creative people from the West. In 1975, Zimmer began painting and befriended two of Hödicke’s students; Salomé and Helmut Middendorf. In 1977, along with Salomé, Helmut Middendorf, Rainer Fetting and others, he co-founded the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin where he has his first solo exhibition. He chooses traditional subjects from nature but he turns them into luminous worlds with merging colors. The artists at the Galerie am Moritzplatz showed the Berlin underground in their work but of course there were similar groups from the 1980s in other German cities, each with their own local stylistic characteristics. The common basis of these “wild” groups from the early 1980s was the rejection of the art-theoretical findings that had prevailed up to that time. In 1980, Zimmer participated in the exhibition Heftige Malerei at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin. He and his fellow exhibitors become the pop stars of the art scene; the Neue Wilde was born (a neo-expressionist movement). Incidentally, the term Neue Wilde originated with an exhibition (Les nouveaux Fauves, die Neue Wilden) that took place in 1980 in Aachen at the Neuen Galerie – Sammlung Ludwig, later the Ludwig Forum. The term is a reference to the fauves of French art at the beginning of the 20th century. Incidentally, Zimmer did not participate in the latter exhibition (though artists such as Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorf, Markus Lüpertz and AR Penck did). Zimmer has traveled almost all parts of the world, his main subjects he finds in the nature of the different countries he has been to. He lives and works in Polling (Bavaria) and Monteventano (Italy).
Information and quotes from:
https://www.egotrip.de/2015/07/die-heftige-malerei-der-achtziger/
https://ludwigforum.de/museum/forschung/neue-wilde/
https://www.berndzimmer.com/biografie-2/
