A drop does not fall. It hesitates.
It gathers, swells, clings to the surface until its own weight outgrows the tension holding it together. Then it lets go, draws a trail behind it and comes to rest somewhere no one placed it. The paintings in this exhibition are records of such moments.
Dirimart is pleased to present the still flowing, Peter Zimmermann’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s London space. Having mastered epoxy resin as the painting material over the course of three decades, Zimmermann places various bodies of works at the intersection of digital aesthetics and physicality of the material. The exhibition brings together the artist’s most recent body of epoxy-on-canvas works, which will be displayed for the first time.
Peter Zimmermann approaches painting as a new series of experiments to discover aesthetics hidden behind the physical properties of the materials. In a world where the most visual information is currently perceived through pixels, the artist prioritises manual labour without neglecting the potential of numerical inventiveness. The experience comes through the time spent with the material, synthetic resin on canvas, which makes its own decisions, giving birth to a new body of works that Zimmermann builds through various gestures.
The paintings show colour that has moved and whose movement has come to a halt: bubbles that seem to rise through blue, beads clustering into bunches on a red ground, green drops running down a violet field as if the pane had been fogged over only a moment ago. In physics, viscosity is a measure of resistance to flow. Something viscous is neither solid nor liquid; it is on its way between the two, and it is slow. It is in this in-between that these works come into being. The artist decides on colour, quantity, place and angle; the resin decides the rest. Form is not imposed, it is negotiated, within a window of time that closes as the resin sets. What finally stands on the canvas is the outcome of a conversation whose second participant does not speak but holds very definite views.
The viscous has a bad reputation. Jean-Paul Sartre described it as the sticky, that which cannot be possessed and instead clings to its possessor; Mary Douglas saw in it a disturbance of order, because it violates the categories of solid and liquid at once. The paintings know this ambivalence. At first glance they are of great beauty: glossy, deep, almost ornamental. At second glance the formations recall cells, secretions, something that grows without having asked. Attraction and slight unease belong together here. Beauty, in these works, is not smooth. The sheen of the resin does the rest. Whoever stands before the paintings sees themselves and the room reflected in them, blurred, between the drops. The surface gives back what happens in front of it and at the same time opens a view inward, into layers lying one above the other like sediment. The canvas beneath is no longer a painting ground but the bed of a shallow body of water. One looks at the picture and into it at once.
Zygmunt Bauman said that we live in a liquid modernity in which nothing holds its shape any more. Niklas Luhmann would have replied that nothing was ever solid: society consists of events that pass away in the very moment they arise, and everything that appears to us as structure is only a flowing that repeats itself. These paintings tell a third story. Not everything flows. Much of it gets stuck, draws threads, slows down, solidifies halfway. What we take for movement is often just sluggish delay; what we take for stillness is a falling that has not yet finished. In Brisbane, a piece of pitch has been dripping through a funnel since 1927; roughly once a decade, a drop lets go. Viscosity is a question of patience, and patience is a question of scale.
The title of the exhibition holds this double movement in two words, and the English still does two things at once: it means still as in motionless, halted, at rest, and it means still as in yet, even now, continuing. still flowing is thus a standstill and a persistence in a single breath. That is exactly where these paintings stand. They show the moment in which something has not yet found its form and has already stopped losing it, in which the flowing has come to rest and nonetheless goes on. What comes after is open.
still flowing can be seen at Dirimart London from 8 October to 7 November 2026.
