As Peter Zimmermann’s swirling spots, blobs, patches, and waves of colours transformed the bare white walls of Anima Gallery, The Pearl, into a chromatic fantasy feast, Doha’s upper crest turned up in full force to take a dip in the hues.
Top German contemporary abstract artist Zimmermann has been most feted for his blob paintings and book cover paintings, but the new solo exhibition of his paintings titled Diffusion, which opened on Monday and runs until April 18 at Anima, combines the refreshing verve of his new oil paintings with the retrospective-like sweep of his previous masterpieces.


A Zimmermann painting titled particles.

Zimmermann’s way of working — his medium essentially involves airbrushing combined with digital arts — is rather peculiar. Often drawing his source material from texts or book covers, he scans them into his computer, tweaks it using Photoshop and other such digital manipulation toolboxes, and eventually gets the resultant image onto a canvas, which bears nearly no resemblance to the source image. Following application of “numerous strata of pigmented and dyed acrylic resin to the support,” he transforms the contents into “palpable and mellifluous bodies” of light and colour.
“While literally liquidating the gesture vis-à-vis the history of gestural painting, Zimmermann’s pictures nevertheless move, or suggest a kind of kinetic shifting of shape and mass. Paradoxically the work remains gestural, but in the most mediated and unorthodox way,” says art critic Chris Sharp, on Zimmermann’s technique.


One of Zimmermann’s works.

At his Doha show, Zimmermann was busy through the evening walking and talking the many dignitaries — chief among who was HE Dr Hamad bin Abdulaziz al-Kuwari, Minister of Culture, Arts & Heritage, and nearly a dozen ambassadors of various countries — art aficionados, and artists, through his delicious spread of work, and demystifying the endless complexities it holds.
Since the late ’80s, Zimmermann, known all over the world for his many international exhibitions, has been working on an art form which examines the terms and possibilities of contemporary visual depiction. Community caught up with the maverick artist to know more:
 

Heung-kyeong Park, ambassador of Korea to Qatar, and his wife Serena, admiring one of the artist’s works.
 
Be it your blob paintings made using the epoxy resin, which is a sort of plastic paint, or your oil paintings that traverse a sea of tones and colours, what unites all your work is that clean, eye-arresting look. What is the thought behind it?
Sometime in 1999, when I started making these epoxy paintings, I was very much interested in accomplishing a shiny surface. I wanted my art to look like an exact printout of a computer screen. Since my work is created after putting it through several modifications on my computer, the question that I had to answer was how I could find a precise, physical representation of what I am seeing on my screen and put it somewhere on the wall. First, I tried to take high-quality printouts but they looked very normal. I wanted the same intensity of colours like I could see on the screen. So I started to paint but I knew I wanted to achieve the appearance of an exact print; only much more authentic, and also a certain depth to it. That’s how I discovered this material — transparent epoxy resin. I put very intense powdered colours into it, made a mix of it and managed to get very shiny colours and the desired smooth sheen on the surface. That’s the look I have wanted all along.
 
When you say you wanted your blob paintings to achieve the effect of an LED screen, do you somewhere want to underline the essence of the digital revolution that we are all part of?
Yes. In our time, painters don’t go out into the landscape with their easel and paint what they see around them. More or less everything we know about the world today is represented on screens — television screens, computer screens, or the phone screens. That’s how we consume the world around us today. So if you want to say anything about the world, you have to admit that it is beamed at us through these mediums. I wanted to make that fact visible by using such forms and algorithms that are part of the language of these screens. It also points out that any kind of image we take in is modified. The visual is not the truth, it’s a modification.
 
Your end result reduces the source image to merely a swirling blob of colours, to a point where no trace of the original image is left. Why do you do that?
In the beginning, I was very careful about trying to find a balance between hardly recognising the source image and retaining its traces as hints. So you could say it something of its origin. As time went by, I thought that I could more or less do away with the origin, the source image. So what I have tried to focus on is to have an interesting formation or abstraction which works as a painting itself.
 
Has the art world changed a lot from when you started to now?
When I started, it was a very heavy, theoretical and contextual art scene. Today, it’s more liberal, relaxed, or let’s just say diversified, where artists can put out a wide range of work. The discourse, earlier, was much stricter.
 
How tedious is the process of arriving at the final image that becomes your art?
The main work is done when I find the right image on screen. For quite a long time, I play around with thousands of these images. Sometimes, I start with an image like a film still or a photograph that I took myself and pick details from it, and later pick even more details. Sometimes, I cannot follow the journey anymore because it’s the fifth or sixth generation of modifications. Then I leave them for a while. Sometimes, I am technically unable to produce the image I want. Sometimes, after years, I might stumble upon an image I had left some day and wonder, well, I could make this into a painting using that technique.
 
After blob paintings, what is your current muse?
I made blob paintings for 12 years and I really think I discovered, through it, a lot of what is possible. There are still some areas that I haven’t explored yet. But my main focus right now is my new series of oil paintings that are on display here in this new show.
 
How do these oil paintings convey what you want to say, differently?
I started making them two-and-a-half years ago. I make them using a similar approach of using a source image and then modifying it until I like the pattern or the shape. But in the end, they are paintings. Painting is probably one of the most difficult things one can create. It’s like handwriting or calligraphy, where every mistake you make is visible. So it was very different for me to actually paint what I knew I wanted. I was naïve. I would start with an idea and would tell myself that’s how the painting should look like. But while creating the painting, it would become what it wanted to be. It would take an entirely different direction, and I had to accept that what I had wanted was not important. But I persisted, and in the end, I think I managed to work my way around all of that.