Bernd Zimmer
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. Zimmer's subject, unusually for that circle, was landscape, and he left Berlin in 1984 for Upper Bavaria, travelling to Indonesia, Namibia, Iceland and Nepal 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.
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