Bernd Zimmer valuation
Neue Wilde founder who left Berlin for the Alps and has painted landscape at speed ever since.
Bernd Zimmer was born at Planegg in Bavaria in 1948, trained as a bookseller and studied religion and philosophy in Berlin, and in 1977 co-founded the Galerie am Moritzplatz with Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf and Salome — the group that became known as the Neue Wilde and returned German painting to violent colour and fast, expressive figuration.
What a work by Bernd Zimmer is worth
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Bio
Bernd Zimmer was born at Planegg in Bavaria in 1948, trained as a bookseller and studied religion and philosophy in Berlin, and in 1977 co-founded the Galerie am Moritzplatz with Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf and Salome — the group that became known as the Neue Wilde and returned German painting to violent colour and fast, expressive figuration. Zimmer's subject, unusually for that circle, was landscape, and he left Berlin in 1984 for Upper Bavaria, travelling repeatedly to the Sahara and India, and painting mountains, forests, volcanoes and water at large scale and high velocity.
A German market, led by the Berlin works of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which are the historically significant period and the one institutions pursue; the very large subsequent landscape output is a broader and more accessible field. Zimmer paints thinly and fast on large canvases, often with dispersion paint on unprimed or lightly primed grounds, so staining is permanent and the matt surfaces cannot be cleaned or varnished. Works on paper and prints are numerous, and signature and date are usually on the reverse.
At a glance
- Born
- 1948, Planegg
Moritzplatz, the Villa Massimo and Polling
Before he painted full time Zimmer worked in publishing, first as an apprentice at Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich and then as a book designer for Klaus Wagenbach in Berlin. The Galerie am Moritzplatz ran from 1977 to 1981, and he was in Heftige Malerei at the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin in 1980 and in the Museum of Modern Art's International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture in New York in 1984. He held the Villa Massimo fellowship in Rome in 1982 and 1983.
He has lived at the Klostergut in Polling since 1984, with later studios in Emilia-Romagna and Brandenburg, and in 2021 completed STOA169 at Polling, a hall of 121 columns designed by artists from around the world. His work is in the Städel, the Lenbachhaus, the Berlinische Galerie, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Museum Folkwang.
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