Peppi Bottrop

Born in Bottrop, Germany, 1986

Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany

Peppi Bottrop is known for his large graphite and charcoal drawings on different carriers like canvas and fermacell board, often directly attached to the wall. His rhythmical and dense abstract language evolved towards a more focused, scattered and reduced phrasing, as if he zoomed in on his own works with a microscope. These are marks of the artist, traces of actions, decisions and impulses. The artist fragments and reduces what earlier was an intertwining of cluttered strokes into losely dispersed compositions. While cultivating the blank space, stopping his strokes and interrupting his own gestures, Bottrop finds open spaces on new grounds, makes new marks and creates novel clearances. While he keeps testing, feeling, exploring, Peppi Bottrop drafts contradicting velocities in his drawings. He takes a fast pace, suddenly interrupts his gestures of filling up and those of leaving the surface blank and causes fragmented lines, blured traces and stuttering signs. A mixture of beginning, interruption, restart and interruption again, enables the artist to create compositions that appear as weightless as they seem to be distinct. Concurrently Bottrop's marks seem to stem from a preliterate archaic period. They might be evocative of ancient cave drawings - signs made of soot, yet free from depiction and without characters or symbols to come about - but doing so they describe a basic human impulse.

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