“Fortunately, I am a painter and not an artist,” Armin Boehm asserts. “A painter paints, but an artist is forever concerned with staging his or her own presence.” In this, artists – but not only artists, all of us – gain assistance from the digital self-marketing of the social media. Boehm’s latest works are grotesquely ugly two-faced heads that turn in all directions, tearing their outsized tongues from their mouths or tugging at their noses so as to elongate them. A fitting analytical caricature of many contemporaries. Also new are the “double portraits”, in which, in most cases, a man and a woman merge in the centre, allowing a third physiognomy to appear. Boehm has a thoroughly precise eye for our habits and living circumstances: his observations include in equal measure partner relationships and character studies conducted in individual portraits.

While Boehm’s earlier paintings had something dark and mysterious about them, in the second decade of the current millennium not only have lighter surfaces of colour come into play, often interspersed with fabric collages, but the works are infused also with a profound sense of humour. The drastic, often brutal street scenes set in the banlieue always contain a fine irony. Things are never unambiguous, and there are always diverse sideshows going on, in which further figures pursue other activities. The artist allows observers to follow their own trains of thought, but gives them sufficient pointers and indications – in the clothing and fashion accessories of the protagonists, in the architecture of the surroundings and in isolated logos or pieces of lettering.

The grotesque, exaggerated figures and the subliminal sense of dread recall the paintings of German Expressionism. Born in Aachen in 1972, the artist studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie under Konrad Klapheck and Jörg Immendorff, and has for some time now lived and worked in Berlin. His pictures are unrelenting samplers of elements from pop culture and art history, architecture and literature, the politics of the present day and his own imagination. This explosive mixture is a unique portrayal of today’s world with all its bizarre facets and precipitous chasms. “I like painting that comes straight out of life,” says Armin Boehm, looking with a smile at a few Instagram accounts.

Uta Grosenick

translated by Richard Humphrey