The Bernier/Eliades Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Philip A. Zimmermann in Brussels. The exhibition will take place from 15 January to 2 April, with an opening on 15 January from 17:00 to 21:00. Philip A. Zimmermann’s practice encompasses painting, works on paper, collage, and photography, engaging with notions of layering, fragmentation, and transformation. Rooted in an early involvement with illegal graffiti in the border region between Germany and France, his work continuously questions the relationship between surface, intervention, and the traces left by repeated acts of appropriation and overwriting.
His works on paper and collages engage with social and socio-political fragments. Through processes of deconstruction and reassembly, these elements are critically examined, introducing subtle shifts in meaning. Despite the often serious subject matter, the works are infused with a restrained humor and a cynical undertone, revealing a tension between earnestness and irony. Zimmermann’s photographic works, predominantly realized in black and white on 35mm film, depict motifs from his immediate surroundings. Architecture, landscapes, and incidental or overlooked places are captured in a spontaneous and intuitive manner. The raw, fragmentary quality of these images, often enhanced by the use of fisheye lenses, recalls American skateboard videos of the 1990s and early 2000s, establishing a connection between movement, subculture, and perception.
Working across different media, Zimmermann allows his compositions to evolve through layering, interruption, and repetition. His practice resists a purely documentary reading, instead emphasizing transformation and the instability of images. The works emerge as records of urban processes and lived experience, balancing control and chance, structure and disruption. For this exhibition, the artist presents paintings. These works form a dialogue between urban experience and abstraction, between spontaneous intervention and reflective construction. The paintings unfold as dense, multilayered surfaces in which fragments, overpainting, and erasures coexist, revealing a continuous process of modification. Traces of vandalism and graffiti remain present, not as explicit references, but as translated elements within an autonomous pictorial language.
Philip A. Zimmermann (b. 1988, Saarbrücken) lives and works between Germany and Belgium. He began his artistic practice in the early 2000s with graffiti before gradually shifting toward painting from 2012 onward, later expanding into photography. His work has been exhibited at Bernier/Eliades in Brussels and Athens, as well as in group exhibitions including Kin, Brussels.