Hendrik Zimmer

Morgen und Felder

21 March - 31 May 2020

Hendrik Zimmer

In the exhibition ‚Morgen und Felder‘ we are showing new works by the Frankfurt artist Hendrik Zimmer, who now again emphasises the painterly flow more strongly than the works of recent years. But Zimmer remains true to himself in his new series of paintings and the title of the exhibition already underlines his poetic view of his artistic work.

With ‚Morgen und Felder‘ Zimmer refers to color field painting and makes use of a term from times past. A „Morgen Land“ (acre of land) was originally the area that a man could work with a horse plough. Even the slow way of painting in the studio seems to have fallen out of time and yet is still a current artistic way of life. The colour fields in Zimmer‘s paintings, consisting of many layers, bear witness to this activity.

The ‚morning‘ as a pictorial synonym of the daily new beginning, the immediate future and for the ‚softening of darkness‘ associated with the end of the night also tells of the constant struggle (of an artist) with his own actions. The daily challenge of the new and uncertain. An outdated concept as well as the square measure? In our digital age, in which things happen parallel and simultaneously, doesn‘t every temporal moment lose its significance?

And yet Zimmer‘s new works continue to focus on striving for the image itself, the search for the identity of the work and thus the question of the connections between things, the images and one‘s own actions. For his paintings, Zimmer once again uses found materials such as photographs, newspapers, and posters. Layered, deformed, torn and reworked with paint, they become part of the picture. Gestural-expressive surfaces are bundled together by linear structures, thus subdividing them into individual picture fields, but at the same time bringing them together to form an overall composition. The individual ‚fields‘ open up different pictorial worlds that exist independently of each other, but which communicate with each other and which – for a moment? – form a whole.

Zimmer‘s works do not only visualize the simultaneity of the images, but also their flow. A moment that also connects the Frankfurt artist with works by Max Beckmann. In pictures such as the 1929 ‚Rugby Players‘, he gave contour to the bundle of inter-woven and superimposed forms by deliberately drawn lines. An artistic strategy that Zimmer also uses in his works to capture the moment of movement. Like Beckmann, Zimmer freezes a moment in which change and the ever-new is already inscribed.