Artists

Peppi Bottrop

Press release

Peppi Bottrop’s work rarely sits still. Circles, arcs, and gestural marks cut, scored, and scratched into the copper gather into movements charged with physical intensity. Each line seems to record the force of its making. Alongside these are sculptures incorporating skulls—a quiet counterpoint. Emit Remmus. Fire Walk with Me carries different landscapes within it. Bottrop’s roots in the Ruhr region, Germany’s historic center of coal mining and heavy industry, surface in the industrial materials and rusty metal. But these materials now point elsewhere. What once recalled coal, steel, and the crisis of industrial society shifts toward American imagery: Los Angeles, a city of oil, automobiles, and the promise of movement and freedom. The gleaming copper looks both precious and worn. You can almost smell the greasy motor oil beneath its surface and on the yellow-tinted canvases. Wires, rusty screws, oil, and fire bring an urban DIY aesthetic that could have come straight from a California backyard together with the material legacy of industrial labor. The series title directly references David Lynch’s cult film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Lynch’s enigmatic small-town world has something uncanny and hidden lurking beneath the American idyll. Bottrop’s works share this sense of the familiar turning strange, though often with a pull toward the absurd. His sculptures resemble bizarre readymades from the iconography of the Wild West: glowing cattle skulls, wilted flowers, and rusty shovels—relics of an American mythology. Somewhere between totem pole and darkly humorous memento mori, they conjure a world in which nature, myth, and decay overlap. The American dream and its material remnants sit side by side. Bottrop counters this imagery of decay with the visceral energy of his canvases and copper plates. A sense of physical strain runs through their dynamic forms. At times, figures seem to emerge from the depths, driven by some invisible spark. The drawings scratched into the copper resemble memories etched deep into a life. They keep gathering and intensifying, only to break free and reform. Elsewhere, they dissolve into softer, painterly gestures that stretch across the surfaces like a long exhale. The tension begins to ease—a calm born not of control, but of letting go. Here, Fire Walk with Me feels less like a call to overcome something than an invitation to accept it. And then there is Emit Remmus—“Summer Time” spelled backward. A touch of nostalgia, turned on its head. The path is no straighter than the form or content of Bottrop’s output. Detours welcome, the works seem to say. Not straight ahead, then, but backward, forward, around in circles, and starting over, again and again. Text by Anneli Botz Translation by Amy Patton