Franz Ackermann

In 1991 Franz Ackermann received the DAAD grant allowing him his first trip to Asia and settling for a year in Hong Kong. Traveling has become fundamental in his works ever since, experimenting with practices inspired by situationist deviation and psycho geography. Ackermann uses photographs and sketches done in pencil, ink and watercolor, taken during voyage, to make mental maps. They are not mimetic reproductions of the territory but instead a synthesis of the physical and mental world. From these, he elaborates vertiginous agglomerations of vibrant colors, which confront the viewer with a collapsed perspective of pictorial, geographical and architectural space. 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. Often, he creates images and memory traces of explorations of cities. Cities as spatial but also mental orientations within an urban network; urban structure as a model for cultural and social systems of reference. For Ackermann, the voyage and the experiences that he lives through are part of the creative process. Although world travel is hardly an invention of the twentieth let alone the twenty-first century, tourism is a particularly contemporary mode of being in the modern world. We are now confronted with a myriad of possibilities for travel. But despite the more enlightened, less imperialistic forms of travel at our disposal today, and a full knowledge of their economic importance to developing countries, Ackermann addresses the question what precisely it means to participate in the global economy.

You are my everyone, you are my anyone You are my anytime, you are my everytime You are my everywhere ... anywhere ...

Untitled (Pocket Park: in gold we trust)

Franz Ackermann

Franz Ackermann

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