Sandro Ricaldone

HP ZIMMER
» es gibt im Moment keine besseren Künstler als uns in Deutschland «
(There are no better artists than us in Germany at the moment)
Tagebuch 1957 – 1965
edited by Barbara Hess, Nina Zimmer
foreword by Matthias Mühling
Hatje Cantz, 2022

“I have kept a diary since my school days,” HP Zimmer remarked in 1984. This is also true of the time of the artists’ group SPUR he co-founded in 1957. He wrote to “seek my own point of view in the midst of often turbulent events and sometimes controversial debates.” This book presents representative excerpts from the manuscript, which was reviewed by the artist in the early 1990s. Stylistically aware and (self-) critical, Zimmer comments on the cultural and social climate of postwar Germany. He provides insights into the contemporary German art scene and its European network with close ties to the Situationist International. The debates recorded by Zimmer in his diaries – about painting and artistic freedom as well as revolution, boxing matches, crime series, and the threat of nuclear war – are still strangely relevant to us today.

HP ZIMMER (1936-1992) studied at the Hamburg Kunsthochschule and the Munich Kunstakademie in the late 1950s. SPUR, which he co-founded, was one of the first post-war avant-gardes groups in the Federal Republic. In 1982, HP Zimmer became a professor of painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig.