PEPPI BOTTROP

PKM Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by a rising young German artist Peppi Bottrop. The exhibition, comprised of the artist’s ten new paintings, will be the first time to introduce him in Korea and his first solo show to be held in Asia.

Rather than visualising or representing the reality, Peppi Bottrop expresses the primitive clash per se occurred within the human mind on canvas or fermacell board. Using brittle and black materials such as graphite, charcoal, and coal, Bottrop’s works can be line-drawings, graffiti, paintings, or sometimes flat sculptures that can easily be fixed on walls with staplers. Like transcending the classification of genres, the artist removes the surrounding borders by minimalising the use of frames, thus allowing the works to be intimately connected to the exhibition space itself.

The soot and black smudge on the surface of the canvases are the traces of Bottrop’s intuitive actions in different speeds, which are reminiscent of the Ruhr region, the centre of coal-mining industry where the artist grew up in. The connection and rupture the artist had encountered based on his experiences and recollection of the frayed industrial area of western Germany are transcribed on the canvases. History moves not in linear but in spiral; some are forgotten while some are remembered; the moments from the past moves either slow or fast in our memories. Thus, Bottrop’s paintings are psychological maps that captures the scattered time and space of his childhood.

Meanwhile, his rhythmical surfaces of synaptic strokes that are combined, overcrowded, disconnected, or left vacant resonate with the paintings’ titles that are in abbreviation. The presence of the entangled and sprawled strokes is not only a cacophonous music of buzzing and deafening noise but also a primitive scene before the existence of language. Laid in front of his paintings, the viewers will experience both the sense of quietness and liveliness that co-exist in his works.

Peppi Bottrop studied under Albert Oehlen, a master of abstract expressionism, at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and earned an Akademiebrief and Meisterschüler. He has held solo exhibitions and two-person shows at various prominent institutions such as Kunstverein Heppenheim, Germany; Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop, Germany; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, US; and at galleries located in Berlin, Köln, Brussel, Madrid, and Oslo. The artist is expanding his field of activity by participating in various group exhibitions including the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany; Museum Wiesbaden, Germany; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany; and Fondazione Carriero, Milano, Italy.