Franz Ackermann creates large-scale installations that include paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and site-specific wall paintings. With vivid colors and architectural aspects, his work embraces dynamism where different stories and both real and imaginary places become connected, dissolved and collided each other. Ackermann’s work suggests that painting is not a stable medium, but is something that is constantly branching out into new territories. For Ackermann, travel is both important theme and methodology. Since his stay in Hong Kong in 1991, he continues traveling and has evolved a set of visual practices that investigated the “psychogeographical” aspects of travels. A major part of these practices can be found in what he has termed the “mental maps”—small drawings that are created on the transportation and hotel rooms during his travels, and capture his visual experiences, not the exact documentation of the places. These “mental maps” are fragmented and abstracted, and turned into paintings. In his solo exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery in 2005, Ackermann stayed in Tokyo for about 3 weeks and created an installation in the gallery space. Next year, he also created a site-specific work by placing paintings on the wall painting in “Tokyo-Berlin / Berlin-Tokyo” exhibition at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Incorporating components of urbanism, traces of movements, imaginations and experiences, and the dialogue between the city and himself, Ackermann’s practice keeps generating and transforming as if it is an endless movement. His work, with multi-layered images and the power of unsettling the sense of balance, seems to represent the contemporary urban life that is full of liberation and confusion.
In this long-awaited solo exhibition in Japan, new paintings and mixed media pieces will be on view. Ackermann stayed one week before the opening, walking around the city of Kyoto and producing. The images captured in photographs during his walks, the colors and other elements of the city, and his experience become part of new work, like a site-specific wall painting, or the exhibition space itself.
