Tim Plamper

CHAOS, 2025 Pencil on paper, 196 × 282 cm On view at: ART PARIS 2025 @galeriebacqueville Booth E13 - group show Reproduction by: @nicolasblanchadell Excerpt of TIM PLAMPER: THE STRATA OF THE PRESENT by Ingrid Luquet-Gad (translated from French) Tim Plamper’s drawings make you dizzy. Cosmic vertigo, ontological vertigo. Of course, scale has a lot to do with it. The German artist, born in 1982, has a penchant for very large formats. On the surface of the paper, he brings into play a palette of gestures as old as humanity, suspended in their eternal recommencement. Tracing, scratching, caressing, incising, hatching, crossing out, filling in, covering over. It’s a choreography that the artist calls ‘ecstatic’ (Interview with the artist, Paris, December 2023), an intuitive and incantatory process. A mineral landscape emerges, dark and lunar. […] Tim Plamper operates from within contemporary visuality—his own, and that of the human beings of Western societies burdened with memory and the past, buried under a blanket of History. The artist’s new series, presented as part of the ‘Lovers’ series, reveals a number of tropes that are characteristic of his grammar: the chrome rims on the big cars, the zebra-like reflections in the shop windows, the safety signs on the black jackets, the arched or languid silhouettes of the rave parties that drag on into the after-parties, and then some of the rocks and weeds of the suburban areas where the precariat wanders, is bored and enjoys itself. […] This is a well-known fact, and its signs have been photographed many times. But what the artist draws from it—through his blind and spiralling practice of drawing—is something else again: the slow and inexorable ascent of the structures of myths and archetypes […] from the post-capitalist totality itself. Dancing feet, drawing hands: trance is unique to the human species, and only the features that indicate it have changed. Full text: see link in bio!

AURA, 2025 Pencil on paper, 196 × 282 cm On view at: ART PARIS 2025 April 3rd - 6th, 2024 Opening Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025 @artparisartfair Galerie Bacqueville @galeriebacqueville Booth E13 - group show Grand Palais 7 avenue Winston Churchill 75008 Paris Artists David de Beyter @daviddebeyter Côme Clérino @comeclerino Delage + Olson @delage_and_olson Laurent Delecroix @laurent.delecroix Raphaël Denis @raphael_denis_artist Thomas Devaux @thomasdevaux Norman Dilworth Bérangère Fromont @berangerefromont Marc-Antoine Garnier @marc_antoine.garnier Lieven Hendriks @lievenhendriks Aurélien Maillard @aurelien_maillard Jan van Munster @studio_jan_van_munster Tim Plamper Reproduction by: @nicolasblanchadell

VOID, 2024 Pencil on paper, 196 × 282 cm First drawing of a new series in collaboration with @galeriebacqueville Reproduction by: @nicolasblanchadell

THE VALUE OF ART — On what a work asks beyond price This reflection follows the difference between price and value, tracing the conditions under which a work begins to matter beyond ownership, circulation, and display. It moves from possession to presence, from visibility to silence, and from the speed of recognition to the slower time in which art can actually be met. The text holds a central contradiction open: art exceeds price, yet survives within material structures of support, access, and inequality. It asks how a work continues to act inside a culture where visibility often arrives before encounter, and where what matters most is often what cannot perform on command. The essay does not defend art through purity, but through relation, risk, duration, and the pressure a real work can place upon a life. Read the full essay on Substack. (Link in bio)

THE SELF AS CIRCULATION
– On seeing oneself being seen This reflection follows how visibility shifts from an event to a condition, tracing the everyday gestures through which the self learns to appear, adjust, and measure itself in advance. It moves from images that no longer wait to metrics that arrive before interpretation, asking how circulation reorganises value, attention, and interior life. The text does not call for disappearance, but for a different relation to presence, where experience is allowed to hold time and the self no longer has to prove itself in order to remain. Read the full essay on Substack.
(Link in bio)

NEURAL MIRROR – On the doping of perception This reflection follows how attention is shaped through rhythm rather than persuasion, tracing everyday gestures through which perception adapts to constant availability and repetition. It moves from the training of the nervous system to the body’s capacity to recalibrate tempo, asking what happens when looking becomes labour and how proportion returns when rhythm slows enough to be felt. The text does not argue for withdrawal, but for a different mode of dwelling within the ongoing stream, where attention regains weight and freedom becomes a matter of measure rather than speed. Read the full essay on Substack. (Link in bio)

WHEN THE IMAGE REFUSES TO OBEY – How form emerges when intention loses authority Creation begins when control loosens and attention settles into the small shifts that shape a form. What holds a work alive is rarely its clarity but the way it carries the pressure of what exceeded intention. This piece follows the moments where resistance becomes structure and where the act of viewing becomes a form of participation. Read the full piece on Substack (link in bio)

„Was meinst du, ist der Sinn deines Lebens?“ Mit dieser Frage beginnt die dritte Folge von „unfold – der Podcast“ – ein Gespräch zwischen Psychologin Johanna Oppermann und Künstler Tim Plamper. Die Folge führt durch biografische Wendepunkte und Krisen und zeigt, wie Sinn oft erst im Rückblick sichtbar wird. Tim erzählt, wie der Einbruch des Kunstmarkts zunächst ein schmerzhafter Einschnitt war und sich später als Einladung erwies, neue Wege des Arbeitens, Lehrens und Lebens zu erkunden. Es geht um Spiritualität, Verantwortung, Gemeinschaft und die Frage, wie innere Freiheit entstehen kann, wenn äußere Sicherheiten bröckeln. Ein Gespräch, das dazu einlädt, neue Perspektiven zuzulassen und Vertrauen in den eigenen Weg zu finden. Die Folge ist online - link in Bio Fotos: @pernille_sandberg @nicolasblanchadell

Written from within the field after a long walk through Berlin at dawn in conversation with @aaaaaaaelsaaaaaaa . This reflection asks why art still matters when structures shift, and why making, collecting, and supporting art remain essential acts of care. Full text on Substack. (Link in bio)

The Erosion of Substance, was one of the first written for The Mirror Age. It grew from questions that have followed for years: How can art sustain depth when the world rewards only visibility? How can we build spaces that hold time instead of consuming it? Read the full piece on Substack (link in bio)

This post opens a publication series that has been growing inside Mental Empire, a field I have been building since 2021. Over the past months I have been shaping the codes, frameworks and cycles that allow these reflections to appear, a system of writing that thinks with me. Together we have gathered the first forty reflections. They form the opening arc of The Mirror Age. This first text introduces the architecture itself: how reflection becomes method and how perception turns into form. Here on Instagram each piece appears as a short fragment, a pause in the scroll. On Substack each reflection unfolds as a full essay, where the constellation and rhythm of the field become visible. The Mirror Age is the public voice of Mental Empire, where art, philosophy and memory share one architecture. Thank you for reading slowly and for entering this space at its beginning. Follow @mental___empire for the fragments and subscribe to The Mirror Age on Substack (link in bio).

MORPHEUS Morpheus is a fictional beauty product campaign built as a study in transformation. In Greek mythology, Morpheus is the shaper of dreams, a figure who shifts forms and carries images from one state to another. This idea defines the visual logic of the film. The process brought together mood research, AI-generated imagery, script development, and the translation of stills into motion through controlled morphing and sequencing. Everything in the film originates from AI-generated material. Scenes drift, dissolve, and reform with a strong cinematic pulse. The result is a speculative commercial in which beauty becomes a metaphor for metamorphosis — a surface that keeps changing shape, as if dreaming itself forward. Music – Boy Harsher Creative Direction, Art Direction, AI Visuals, Edit and Final Cut – Tim Plamper