Bernd Zimmer: On Paper

NYC | 146 West 57th Street

Bernd Zimmer

On Paper

Upsilon Gallery is pleased to announce ”Bernd Zimmer: On Paper,” the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. Opening on October 12 at 146 West 57th Street, the exhibition will feature a selection of unique works on paper by the artist.

Nature, largely untouched by man, is the central theme of Bernd Zimmer, who has been working as a painter for more than four decades on motifs such as landscape, vegetation, night sky, weather phenomena, and water. However, he does not strive to depict these motifs as accurately as possible, but rather to formulate them freely in the autonomous painting process,” wrote Dr. René Hirner on the occasion of Bernd’s exhibition “Alles fließt” at Galerie Wolfgang Jahn. Today, the German painter is internationally renowned. In 2020, he realized a long-held dream by mounting STOA169, a permanent installation in Bavaria, Germany featuring a hall of columns designed by over a hundred artists from around the world.

In Grosser Wasserfall (Large Waterfall), 1980, a rush of light water cascades downward over ragged rocks that hover in midair, threatening to crash out of the picture plane. The spatial relationships between rocks and water are a little irrational, askew; the more we look, the more aware we become of Zimmer’s fantasy. Whatever we might imagine is happening wouldn’t happen in reality quite the way that Zimmer has us see it.

Expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, and Post-Impressionists like van Gogh, could certainly make their innocent subjects as disconcerting as Zimmer and other young neo-Expressionists make theirs; but the concept of displacement or chaos seems far more important to Zimmer and others than does the manifestation of that displacement on the canvas.

In Artforum (September 1981) Wolfgang Max Faust has written that the then current work of the neo-Expressionists from Berlin is fascinating because it suggests a “yearning to belong” with those who “expressed themselves out of a deep, inescapable need.” Though Bernd Zimmer is an accomplished painter, the idiosyncrasies of his paintings aren’t nearly as interesting as that yearning itself, which seems an artificial burden.”

To inquire about works by Bernd Zimmer, please email us at info@upsilongallery.com.