Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

As one of Germany’s prominent contemporary painters, he has developed a significant style: Franz Ackermann condenses contemporary global travel impressions, both from his own experience and those communicated through the media, into an explosive, pop-art wall canvas. In his new special exhibition in Bonn you can see the extent to which he has proven himself, from his small-format “Mental Maps” to his work as a large-scale installation artist.

It’s as though art is rebelling brutally against conventions that are centuries old – liberating itself irrevocably and forcefully from the shackles of its own structure and the architecture defined for it. Franz Ackermann’s large formats grow veritable iron bars and balustrades made from natural elements. Headless artificial palms or torn-off flight luggage labels are the three-dimensional requisites of reality that occupy the environment. Blankets and piles of clothes have been deposited on the floor, just as hippyesque in colour as the pop-art amoebas in the painted work. And breaches can be seen in the murals like those of a dilapidated wall, through which glimpses of a model-like miniaturised world are created.



You are given the impression that it could develop a life of its own completely beyond its creator’s control, this carpet of colour that at some points implodes in its own facets and then bursts with power again. The new special exhibition in Bonn Art Museum billows beyond the spatial constraints in a style symptomatic of Franz Ackermann, incorporating not only the wall surfaces but also the doorways and even the floor in this all-over installation. Objects on the periphery of department store trash or tourism folklore populate the halls here and there.

Magical giddiness included

If anyone has turned the traditional relationship between painting and space, two-dimensional image and physical experience of an exhibition, completely on its head in the past 15 years, then it is this artist, who was born in Upper Bavaria in 1963 and now lives in Berlin. But what does “turning it on its head” mean with Franz Ackermann anyway? His artistic meshwork spreads out like a root, a structure proliferating in all directions without any hierarchical system of order. The collages and ornaments seem to follow a chaotic and dynamic energetic force released by gravity in their compulsion to expand.

Magical giddiness is included for the viewer if he engages with the radiantly coloured landscape of shapes complete with its superimposed spot-like symbols from the world of graphics for any length of time. There are vortex-like concentrations of graphic elements and coloured shapes, which attract the eye like a hurricane. Then again circling “eyes of colour” threaten to devour the observer in their absorbing depths.



To bring your sense of orientation back to earth after it has been whirled around to that extent, Ackermann positions ready-made objects such as furniture around the room. The fact that he has mastered perfectly effects such as radical perspective shortening or the classic trompe l’oeuil effect of the Baroque era goes without saying for an artist trained from scratch and well-versed in the history of art such as Franz Ackermann. He studied at the Munich and Hamburg Academies, today he teaches painting himself at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts.

“The Monk by the Sea can go home”

“Reality has shifted locations. Travelling, hiking, taking a walk, going for a stroll, finding one’s bearings, pursuing, hanging around and begging are only suitable for acquiring an authentically experienced world to a point, as long as the presence at a real location promises less than its communication through media. The Monk by the Sea can go home.” In this capricious denial of the contemplative view of nature, as also represented through a symbolic figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Monk by the Sea, Franz Ackermann eventually highlights how intensively the change in perspective between reality and digital representation now governs our perception. Thanks to the data highway, upon which the whole world is now on the road, distances compress and stretch as they would with an expander. Franz Ackermann, himself a global traveller in the art world, enjoys comparing (mass) tourism with a specific form of terrorism.

In his Mental Maps – which are highly sought after by collectors – local impressions are intensified with purely imagined material, resulting in an atmospherically subjective view of the world. He produced these small-format water colours as travel logs quite intentionally at all possible places. But one should always be suspicious of cartographic inserts, they mostly remain attached to the realm of fantasy or the artist’s vague memory. As multi-universal as his collage-like, urban and psychedelic landscapes are, Ackermann’s larger works frequently cannot be detached from the ensemble of an installation. Anyone who buys one receives a certificate with precise installation instructions independent of the author. After all with wall canvases Franz Ackermann in some cases only supplies the designs, while his brother or a team takes on the completion, just like it would have been in a work-sharing artists’ workshop in medieval times. That is another aspect of his pleasantly open approach to authenticity.