Peppi Bottrop’s practice maps a dense, improvisational language of abstraction rooted in the industrial landscapes and psychological residues of the Ruhrgebiet, the once-thriving coal mining region in western Germany where he was born and from which he takes his artist name. Trained under Albert Oehlen and steeped in the lineage of gestural mark-making, Bottrop works primarily with charcoal and graphite on canvas, panel, and raw industrial materials, producing sprawling, diagrammatic compositions created through intense processes of rubbing and erratic, sweeping line work. These works operate as schematic records of motion, thought, and spatial compression—visual systems that merge architectural reference, urban detritus, and personal memory into recursive, fractured surfaces. While his compositions often appear impulsive or chaotic, Bottrop approaches them with a rigorous internal logic, allowing tonal swells and directional lines to cluster and dissolve across raw grounds. His abstractions register the psychic weight of a region marked by economic collapse: during the 1970s and ’80s, the Ruhrgebiet, like Appalachia in the U.S., saw its mines shuttered, its communities depopulated, and its infrastructure abandoned. The slow reclamation of these landscapes by nature—ongoing over the past quarter-century—forms the conceptual spine of Bottrop’s work, which continually negotiates between the constructed and the organic, entropy and form. The results hover between drawing and architecture, floor plans and circuit boards, functioning as psycho-cartographies of a place both built and remembered. Bottrop’s monochrome compositions hum with the residue of post-industrial decay and the residual pulse of labor, transforming ruin into structure and gestural abstraction into a conduit for contemporary experience.

Peppi Bottrop (b. 1986 in Bottrop, DE) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions of Bottrop’s works include Jungle Rapture (2021) at Pilar Corrias in London, schwarze schraube deutschland (2021) at PKM Gallery in Seoul, Going Deeper Underground (2020) at Galería Heinrich Ehrhardt in Madrid, Sabotage (2020) at Galerie Meyer Riegger in Berlin, and How Long is Forgotten (202) at Sies + Höke in Düsseldorf. Bottrop’s work has also been the subject of a number of recent institutional exhibitions including Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland (2019) at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Wiesbaden and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Line Packers (with Albert Oehlen) (2018) at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, Hovel (2016) at Kunstverein Heppenheim in Heppenheim, Germany; and Fasi Lunari (2016) at Fondazione Carriero in Milan. In 2014, Bottrop graduated as Meisterschüler from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, studying under Albert Oehlen, Andreas Schulze, and Jutta Koether.

PRESS

CURRICULUM VITAE

GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

November 16th 2024 to January 11th 2025
Boothill Express

January 21st to February 22nd 2022
PEPPI BOTTROP | ROBERT JANITZ

March 13th to May 16th 2020
2020

September 15th to October 27th 2018
ENCHANTING ESCAPADE

March 3rd to April 14th 2018
SKIP TRACER

SELECT EXHIBITIONS

April 26th - September 8th 2024
Abstraction (re)creation – 20 under 40
Le Consortium, Dijon, FR

May 3rd to July 24th 2024
Peppi Bottrop: Tropic Of Bottrop
Oldenberger Kunstverein

February 14th - September 6th 2020
Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland
Deichtorhallen Hamburg

March 1st - August 12th 2018
Line Packers: Peppi Bottrop and Albert Oehlen
Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles