Overview
Peppi Bottrop (b. 1986 in Bottrop, Germany) lives and works in Los Angeles.
He graduated as Meisterschüler from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2014, where he studied under Albert Oehlen, Andreas Schulze and Jutta Koether. Bottrop, who bears the name of the German town in which he was born, grew up in the industrial districts of the Ruhrgebiet, once the country’s largest and most prosperous coal-mining region. As one mine after another shut down, the expression “industrial nature” was coined to describe the wild vegetation that developed on abandoned production sites, and it is this very dichotomy, or schism, between industry and nature, that Bottrop explores in his practice. Treating the canvas as a privileged site to exorcise his memories of place, Bottrop psychically mines his own past to create frenetically rendered cartographic recollections, which, though profoundly personally, are open-ended enough to allow the viewer to project their own urban reminiscences.
