Dirk Zimmer

Dirk "Dizi" Zimmer (2 October 1943 – 26 September 2008) was a German artist and an illustrator and writer of American children's books.

Biography Zimmer was born in Goslar in Lower Saxony. He grew up mostly in Hamburg, where he attended the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg from 1963 to 1968.

The German period In 1965, he, with fellow artists Francesco Mariotti, Herman Prigann, Werner Nöfer, and Dieter Glasmacher, co-founded Cruizin 4, an art organisation best known for two events: the opening of the exhibition Cruizin 4 in the Gallery Mensch at Fischmarkt Hamburg-Altona and a performance at Cosinus, a pub in the university district. The Happening 1. World Record in Permanent Painting took place under medical, and specifically psychiatric care, by doctors of the University Hospital Eppendorf. (The planned 80-hour performance was cancelled after 36 hours on medical advice because of collapse of one of the participants).

Under the moniker 'Dizi', Zimmer had a brief career as a painter during the German avant-garde movement and then turned to film-making, which he eventually dropped in the late 1970s to work as an illustrator for American publications including Crawdaddy, The New York Times, and The New-York Magazine. Over the years, both his paintings and illustrations were shown in private galleries in New York, Germany, Switzerland, and France.

The American period His work as a children's book illustrator began after moving permanently to New York City in 1977. He also continued to exhibit his artwork and to be a presence in the New York art scene. He lived in a flat in John Street for a lengthy period of time. The only media contact with his homeland was through the German Boa Vista magazine, in which he first published vignettes, then later his written and illustrated (from 1977, New York) short-story comic with the cryptically and untranslatable German title Die mysteriöse Schratzmichlöse. From 1978 to 2004 Zimmer published more than thirty children's books.