Peter Zimmerman plays with colors, stickers in 1st Philippine solo show

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February 3, 2026 | 5:30pm

MANILA, Philippines — In a world where everything digital reigns supreme, German artist Peter Zimmerman fills walls with his colorful epoxies, surrounded by murals made of stickers.

Zimmerman is no stranger to the Filipino art scene, having exhibited before in Art Fair Philippines through Taiwan and New York-based gallery Nunu Fine Art.

His "Painting Rules" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila (The M) in Taguig running until April 30, however, is his first institutional solo outing in the country.

"I like breaking the rules, I'm not a machine," Zimmerman said during a press preview of his exhibit on Tuesday, February 3, to members of the media, including Philstar.com.

"I think that's part of the game — to have some rules and to break them," the artist added. 

Zimmerman had several other options for his exhibit's title, most of them shut down by Nunu Fine Art for being too strange or inadequate.

Eventually, he settled on a title that "expresses the algorithmic background" of his paintings, noting that the word "rules" had ambiguous meanings that fit well into his own ideas.

Painting styles

The German artist has been doing epoxy on canvas paintings for decades now, though at the turn of the millennium, most of his works were derived from computer footage.

"They all have something to do with this digital imagery I play around with," Zimmerman shared. "So all the motifs I get have a photo or any kind of digital footage behind it."

He founded an application that transforms a photo into a sort of "unblocked-like structure," which serves as his starting point.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s when Zimmerman was starting out, he had no idea how extract the imagery from computers. Printings wouldn't cut it, so he painted instead.

"But I started to paint it in a way that actually resembles a little bit [of the] printing process," he said, noting that his early works were akin to CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key or Black).

After finding the image by overlapping these main colors, Zimmerman does a sort of color separation and transfers them via projection on the canvas.

Newer works, however, like "#3116 shape of things," "Crest," and "Pillar" feature warmer and softer colors as the artist realized these offer prettier gradients when mixed.

Outside of his iconic epoxy paintings, Zimmerman has delved into oil pointing done using his finger as seen in "Painting Rules." 

One artwork — "Sweeping" — is inspired by the idea of people using fingers to swipe on their phones. Different colors "swipe" in different directions, meeting together to make an abstract form.

"I thought it would be an adequate way of putting the paint on the canvas," the artist explained.

Sticker murals

Accompanying Zimmerman's select works are an array of stickers by Felix Rabe collated to form patterned murals.

The artist said that when he was offered to exhibit in Manila, he wanted to have a special concept that features murals made out of stickers.

Ten university students assisted Zimmerman in posting hundreds of stickers on the wall to form murals, and the outcome left the German artist quite satisfied.

Much of Rabe's sticker designs feature texts like "I post therefore I am," "Stop flooding us with corruption," "Revolution (with "evol" highlighted in red to depict "love"), "Generation Generate," and "Mahal."

There are also stickers that are simply images, such as a fist with the Philippine flag imposed on it, the old Metropolitan Museum of Manila when it was previously located in the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, and of Jose Rizal.

The use of the museum's old location appears a sentimental choice for Zimmerman, perhaps a nod to the Metropolitan Museum of Manila's golden anniversary this year.

Other images came by a simpler route — Zimmerman simply searched "stickers, Philippines" on Google and went with what the search yielded.

He was particularly fascinated by the numerous times Rizal's face came in the search options. 

"Somehow his image always appeared when I Googled it. I had the feeling he's like a Che Guevara image for the Philippines," the artist quipped. "It's like an iconic picture, and so I had him in the show."

Zimmerman revealed that he recently visited the walled city of Intramuros to better understand Rizal's history. He realized that it was a touching gesture and made him more appreciative of the countrys perceived national hero.

The stickers, however, only fill up three walls of the exhibit. No stickers can be found around four of his oil paintings, which Zimmerman intentionally decided against — an act that drives the point of their absence.

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