Iris, 1995
Bernd Zimmer

Bernd Zimmer (born November 6, 1948 in Planegg near Munich) is a German painter and a representative of the New Wilds . He lives and works in Polling , Upper Bavaria (Germany), Piozzano , Italy and Warthe , Brandenburg.

From 1968 to 1970 he completed an apprenticeship as a bookseller at Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich. From 1970 to 1972 he was assistant for graphic design at Carl Hanser Verlag. In 1973 he moved to Berlin and began working as a book designer at the Klaus Wagenbach publishing house . He studied philosophy and religious studies at the Free University of Berlin . In 1975/1976 he stayed in Mexico and the southern United States for five months. He started his artistic work.

With Rainer Fetting , Helmut Middendorf , Salomé and others, Zimmer founded the artist self-help gallery Galerie am Moritzplatz in 1977 , which existed until 1981. In 1980, works by these so-called young wild animals were presented to the general public for the first time in the Berlin house on Waldsee under the title Heftige Malerei . In 1981 Bernd Zimmer was represented in the Rundschau Deutschland exhibition .

A scholarship from Villa Massimo took him to Rome in 1982 , where he lived and worked for almost two years. In 1984 he moved to Polling and moved into an apartment and studio in the Polling monastery . In 1991 he set up another studio in Monteventano in Emilia-Romagna . The self-published artist magazine PlantSÜDEN appeared for the first time in 1993 , which he publishes together with Roland Hagenberg, Tokyo. Zimmer has toured the Sahara several times since 1993. In the desert images under this impression, Zimmer often drove formal reduction to the limit of abstract color field painting . In 1994 he moved his studio to Oberhausen in Upper Bavaria. In the summer of 1996 , the first sculptures were created during a stay in Salerno , Campania .

His interest in astronomy and physics led Bernd Zimmer to his Cosmos pictures in 1998 , which were created parallel to other picture cycles until 2006 and which were summarized in an illustrated book Cosmos: Pictures 1998-2006 . The first overview of his woodcuts is shown in 2001 in Museum Morsbroich , Leverkusen. In 2006 the Kunsthalle Mannheim showed the first comprehensive exhibition of the Cosmos pictures. In 2007 Bernd Zimmer moved into another studio in the Brandenburg town of Warthe . Inspired by observing the lakes there, the reflection pictures were created.

In 2010 Zimmer went on a trip to China, in 2011 he visited Vietnam and Cambodia. According to his own statements, he felt inspired by the lush vegetation of Asia and his preoccupation with Chinese painting and philosophy for the series of images of the Crystal Worlds. The Center for Contemporary Art, Augsburg, showed the Crystal Worlds and Reflection Pictures in 2012 for the first time in context. In December 2012, the Bernd Zimmer Art Foundation was recognized as a foundation under civil law. The aim of the foundation is to guarantee the preservation of Bernd Zimmer's artistic work and to support its scientific research and regular public presentation.

He used a work trip to Davos to deal with Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner's “natural hero" Tinzenhorn , which is reflected in the Kirchner-reloaded pictures. Zimmer's Tinzenhorn cycle was exhibited in 2015 in the exhibition “Summit Meeting", which was under the patronage of Reinhold Messner , in the Buchheim Museum , Bernried, together with Kirchner's Davos pictures. The solo exhibition “Everything flows" in the Angerlehner Museum showed a selection of the work groups “COSMOS" and “Floating Light". At the beginning of 2016, Bernd Zimmer traveled to India for the second time. Inspired by the Hindu temples, he took up the idea of an artist portico again.

Since 2016 he has been working on the implementation of STOA169. In 2017, Bernd Zimmer made further trips to southern India's Tamil Nadu , Karnataka , to visit Hindu temples there. On the occasion of his birthday, the Städtische Galerie im Leeren Beutel, Regensburg, and the Museum Neue Galerie in Kassel paid tribute to Bernd Zimmer's work in 2018 with the extensive exhibition "Crystal World".

The columned hall STOA169 was opened in September 2020.