Peppi Bottrop is named after the German city in the Ruhr area where he was born. When one coal mine after another had to close, the term “industrial nature” emerged. It describes the wild vegetation that developed on the abandoned production sites. Through his paintings, Bottrop explores this overlap of industry and nature, creating cartographic spaces of memory.

One reaction to the crises brought about by industrial society was the punk movement – its energy is palpable in Bottrop’s paintings. Elements of “wild painting” combined with evolved structures of geometric abstraction result in a completely new visual language in Bottrop’s large-scale works. His choice of materials is also distinctive: coal, graphite pencils, metal pigments, rust converters and acrylics, reflecting the colour palette of the Rust Belt. Bottrop’s works reflect destruction, growth and the possibility of new orders.

Exhibition text by Grant E. Tyler:

Peppi Bottrop’s paintings are unsettled but not at all uncertain. Their forms spontaneously resemble the curves of a question mark, yet the question is pitched as an assertion. They confront the audience with modernism’s unfinished task. They are raw and immediate, exposed gesso scratched with ephemeral marks of charcoal, like blueprints pointing to a yet unrealized object. They are sentence fragments, echoing and trailing. Open-ended but not lost, in a peculiar suspension of opposites.

There is something stubbornly romantic, almost medieval about Bottrop’s lines. The curves and volumes call to mind the breathtaking sublimity of gothic cathedrals and the innocent splendor of courtly love. They are not exactly lamenting but not exactly jubilant either. They are many-faceted moon phases: crescent, orbital, swollen. The ashen charcoal lends a deadliness. They are assertive. They contain a forceful attitude but the content of that attitude is smokey and ambivalent. If he is a troubadour he is less sentimental, less formally rigid, more life-seeking: less Andrés Segovia, more Randy Rhoads.

Like Henri Matisse’s portrait of Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg, Bottrop’s blooming curves express an irreverent, unsentimental beauty. There is a practicality to the lines, a simplicity. They create motive drama then stop, suggesting no further obligations to picturesque fidelity. The colors too share the brisk shoulder of an industrial life. Matisse’s painting expresses the modernist crisis of ancient romantic beauty, so deeply entrenched in a suprasensory sublimity that direct representation is no adequate container. Still today this form dissolving stance towards expression begs us to consider what is left out of a work. Bottrop’s blissful playfulness, his comfortability with an open-ended materiality and formalism, leaves room for us, the viewers, to ponder what is more left of the modernist aesthetic project. Wait till the end.