Painting begins with an impulse and ends when the impulse resolves — or refuses to. Peter Hirmer works in oil and acrylic on canvas, building surfaces through layered mark-making, scraping and partial erasure. The paintings that result are not records of a plan but evidence of a process: structure emerging, fracturing, and occasionally holding.
Movement and fragmentation are not subjects Hirmer depicts — they are conditions he works within. A canvas is built up and broken back, colour set against colour, form pressed until it gives. The tension that accumulates through this process is what the finished work carries. Whether it resolves into balance or remains suspended in conflict is left to the painting to decide.
The work asks nothing of the viewer except attention. What is found in it — stillness, unease, familiarity, abstraction — belongs entirely to the person looking.
Biography
Peter Hirmer, born 1975 in Dingolfing, Lower Bavaria. Self-taught painter, working since 1995. Lives and works in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Bavaria.
Began drawing with charcoal, moved through watercolour into abstraction. Now works primarily in oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas. Alongside his practice, Hirmer has worked in media, adult education, advertising and IT — a breadth of context that feeds directly into the analytical and intuitive tension visible in his paintings.
Selected works exhibited in Bavaria, 2014–present.
