Waldemar Zimbelmann’s work shifts between painting and drawing, while the characteristics of drawing are of fundamental nature to his work. Sometimes using personal or anonymous photographic images as a point of departure, the artist devises a subtle, sensitive visual language that creates its subjects in an overlap of figuration and abstraction. His paintings emerge from a process of overpainting, which is reflected thematically as the passing of a situation.
The texture of the painting and the three-dimensional paint application is critical to Zimbelmann’s artistic process: based on different layers of paint, which accrue in the process of overpainting, a superposition of colour and colour planes develops, from which the artist renders his visual motifs by uncovering parts of these layers. The linear elements, often sgraffito, are finely drawn, almost resembling woodcut hatching, and are juxtaposed with a vigorous, sometimes extensive planar colouring, which transports a vibration into Zimbelmann’s compositions. At times only hinted at, the silhouettes of people, animals, houses or landscapes lead to a conflation of shape, body, time and space, from which the surreal narratives of Waldemar Zimbelmann’s paintings emerge fragmentarily. Individual or group portraits of people carrying out a silent (inter-) action are present in his compositions as shining and fading figures, their bodies address a shift between location and rootedness - an allegory that figuratively refers to remembered places and one’s own association with them. In his new work, the painting compositions become more concrete: The artist is now increasingly focusing on portraits, which he creates primarily in small formats. In these, he conjoins people from his immediate surroundings as well as fictional characters, their shape rooted in his imagination. Posing alone or in groups, these figures seem like silent protagonists, their wordless but expressive eyes turned to the viewers alone, or - seeing the paintings in succession – collectively.