Happy birthday, Bernd Zimmer!

Natural spaces – pictorial spaces – spaces of experience. For more than four decades, Bernd Zimmer has been dealing with these complex issues in his paintings. The artist finds his subjects on his countless journeys throughout the world, which have inspired his dune, desert, mountain, sky, sea and forest paintings or his large "Cosmos" cycle. Seen landscapes, which Bernd Zimmer explores in series, are his central theme. His colour field paintings, which reflect references to Mark Rothko, among others, are created in processes of overpainting. Although Bernd Zimmer is committed to abstraction, there are always figurative hints that indicate a specific environment or experience of nature and at the same time reveal metaphysical qualities. As multifaceted as Zimmer's visual language is, as diverse are the art historical sources from which Bernd Zimmer draws: from Michelangelo to Vincent van Gogh to Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner. The Buchheim Museum, Bernried, presented the latter and Bernd Zimmer in a double exhibition in 2015.

Bernd Zimmer became known in the art world as a representative of the Neue Wilde (New Wild Ones): Emerging from the milieu of the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin – founded in 1977 together with Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf and Salomé –, they proclaimed a so-called 'Heftige Malerei (Fierce Painting)'. After participating in exhibitions at important institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco, or the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in the 1980s, Zimmer had many other major exhibitions. Galerie Thomas is currently showing a solo exhibition of the artist's paintings from 1979 to the present on the topic of trees.

We warmly congratulate Bernd Zimmer on his 75^th birthday on 6 November 2023.