In this new series of paintings Peppi Bottrop experiments for the first time with a distinctive and vibrant copper pigment, evoking the rust that forms on industrial objects. For the artist, copper is an unpretentious material. Highly conductive, it derives from the earth, is hidden in cables snaking through our walls, and carried in coins in our pockets. Bottrop, who bears the name of the German town in which he was born, grew up in the industrial districts of the Ruhrgebiet, once the country’s largest and most prosperous coal-mining region. As one mine after another shut down, the expression “industrial nature” was coined to describe the wild vegetation that developed on abandoned production sites, and it is this very dichotomy, or schism, between industry and nature, that Bottrop explores in his practice. Treating the canvas as a privileged site to exorcise his memories of place, Bottrop psychically mines his own past to create frenetically rendered cartographic recollections, which, though profoundly personally, are open-ended enough to allow the viewer to project their own urban reminiscences.
He graduated as Meisterschüler from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2014, where he studied under Albert Oehlen, Andreas Schulze, and Jutta Koether. His work has been the subject of a number of important solo and group exhibitions including: Together, at the Same Time, de la Cruz Collection, Miami; Different Strokes, Kunstverein Duisburg, Duisburg; Jungle Rapture, Pilar Corrias, London; La vista y el tacto (ca. 1929-30), Centro Federico García Lorca, Granada; Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Wiesbaden, and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; and Line Packers (with Albert Oehlen), Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles.
[text provided by Pilar Corrias Gallery]
