Common Disposition
September 4, 2026 – October 17, 2026
Hendrik Zimmer
Galerie Heike Strelow
Under the title *Common Disposition*, Hendrik Zimmer presents works created using a wide variety of materials and techniques, all of which stem from a shared artistic approach: woodcuts on canvas, woven rugs, and glass works. What unites these works is not a formal program, but rather an attitude toward the material itself—the conviction that its properties and texture embody and reveal the history and conditions of their creation.
Since late 2021, Zimmer has been working intensively with woodcut—an ancient technique that he has consistently refined. The technique shapes his visual language: solid areas of color, pronounced contours, and a play with color density and intensity. The direct impression of the inked wood onto coarse canvas and the visible divisions of the printing blocks lend the works an almost technical rigor—which makes the approachable, warm feel and playful lightness that the colors and forms nevertheless radiate all the more astonishing. Weave patterns, wood grain, and smudged colors remain visible and become part of the imagery. Zimmer draws on the tradition of Japanese woodblock print workshops and the European avant-garde of the 20th century, developing from these influences a distinctive style of his own.
In *Common Disposition*, woodcut now enters into a relationship with two other craft traditions: weaving and glasswork. All drei precision and patience—and demand that the material itself play a role in the process. It is precisely here that a central aspect of Zimmer’s practice becomes evident: the creative process remains present in the work as a distinct layer. The properties of the material, the craft processes, and the traces of working and transformation remain visible and shape the character of the work. This creates a relationship between the artist’s artistic vision and the material’s own life: the work is understood less as a finished design than as the result of an ongoing dialogue between idea, material, and process.
“Common Disposition” also describes an approach in which material, process, and artistic decision-making enter into a reciprocal relationship—the works derive their autonomy from the interplay of these conditions. In the Japanese tradition of craftsmanship, this is referred to as “listening to the material”—and Zimmer, too, embraces the idea that something within the work seeks to “come into being.”
The focus is not on complete mastery of the material, but on trust in a process whose course can never be fully planned: Each step in the work changes the conditions for the next. Wood, paint, canvas, fabric, and glass are not merely means of execution, but independent actors whose properties help shape the course of the work. This gives rise to a way of working characterized by attention and respect: The focus is not on imposing a form, but on the emergence of a relationship—between idea and material, between intention and process, between what can be guided and what only reveals itself in the act of making.
From this perspective, creativity is less an act of invention than one of perception: it manifests itself where openness and play, experience, and craftsmanship come together—and it is precisely there that the quality that defies explanation emerges.