Franz Ackermann, PIFO Gallery, 2019, IY Studio▲
Born in 1963.
Franz Ackermann is considered as one of the most active and influential artists in the world.
He is well-known for the psychedelic, vibrant paintings and immersive installations.
His works have been shown in numerous international exhibitions,
and are kept in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
Georg-Brauchle-Ring, Munich, 1997
He was awarded ascholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
In 1997 Franz Ackermann received the Art Prize from the city of Nordhorn for the redesign of the Munich subway station "Georg-Brauchle-Ring" .
His works have been shown in numerous international exhibitions and are kept in major museums and collections, such as the Venice Biennale in 2003.
He awarded a “Hugo Boss”nomination in 2004.
He was honored with the award "MFIPreis Kunst am Bau".
When mentioning Ackermann's works, key words such as hallucinative color, abstraction and large-scale installation will immediately come to your mind. Full of secrets and magic, we will see that his artistic life is like a great journey. Everything he gets from the real world is given to us in it. Due to the dislocation and encounter across time and space, Ackermann is called a 'cubist for our time'.
Franz Ackermann has been active as a painter, printmaker and installation artist since the early 1990s. His oeuvre comprises drawings, watercolors, murals, paintings and installations, which he partially extends by photographic works, projections and architectural models. His works centered on themes of tourism, globalization and urbanism, had reflected the social changes and political issues wrought by increasing globalization and the resulting cultural homogenization.
And even though cubism has gone out of style of sorts, the underlying experience has even increased in today ́s hyper-mobile society where space–distance has all but been eliminated by digital communication. In real time information spreads around the globe and can beread by almost everybody today.
Franz Ackermann is keenly aware of this, but also about what gets lost in this kind of communication – that which remains local. So Franz Ackermann travels. And he travels a lot and for extended periods of time. His first extended trip brought him to HongKong, then Manila, Jakarta over to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok, then to Cambodia and back to Hong Kong. Onwards by boat to Shanghai and fromthere to Beijing and back to Berlin using the trans-Siberian railroad.Oil on canvas, mixed media
Summer Exhibition 2020, PIFO Gallery installation view
He doesn ́t just jet in and out. He
spends time, looks at the little things and the large, the simple things
and the complex. He travels light also, a note book, a camera, pencils
and paper and creates, what he calls ‘Mental Maps’ condensed memories of
things he sees, and thoughts that impose themselves on him.![]()
Untitled Shop, 2019 (details)
The ‘Mental Maps’ are very much peripatetic works, most of them start onsite, at location, but the artist continues working on them as he travels and they might not be finished until he returns to Germany sometimes. In a true sense of the word, the ‘Mental Maps’ are nomadicart, when the rest of the painters pretty much lead very settled lives, workingin huge studios. Ackermann does both, but he weaves space and time, the distances travelled, the time spent, the experiences made into his intricately composed art works that conflate temporal and spatial elements so they appear present, as memory does in one ́s mind, simultaneously and incongruently at once. All our memories work like that. Nothing is in a temporal order, like in a movie playing out one scene after the other. To revisit our memories, weal ways must first untangle all the folded-in details, sights, sounds, smells and then of course the emotional and intellectual charge our memories are transporting.
So in a sense the conflation of what can be seen on Franz Ackermann ́s paintings is parallel to our human way of encrypting experience into memory and also, as we are constantly re-editing our memories, Ackermann sometimes leaves “blind spots” on his paintings, white splotches, that he only fills, once the next exhibition is installed and he inserts a new “meme” into the works, so as to be able to react very directly to the situation he finds onsite, in the context of where his work is to be exhibited. Those last minute insertions he uses sometimes for the audience to be able to emotionally connect – he adds a topic, a site, a trope from the local environment into the painting, using the paint and brushes he travels with. Sometimes, it is about being able to react to global news in an almost real time fashion.Again, he uses painting against its usual function transforming it into a mobile, versatile and up-to-date application.Franz
Ackermann was born in Neumarkt-sankt Veit, Germany in1963, lives and
works in Berlin and Karlsruhe. Franz Ackermann studied at Academy of
Fine Arts, Munich during 1984-88; University for Fine Arts, Hamburg from
1989-91. Since 2001, he has been appointed as the professor of Academy
for Fine Arts Karlsruhe.
His
works have been shown in numerous international exhibitions and are
kept in major museums and collections, such as the Venice Biennale in
2003 and exhibited extensively including the Museum of Contemporary Art,
New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York; Kunsthalle Bonn; Kunsthalle St Gallen, Switzerland and Irish
Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. His works are held in the collection of
the Museum of Modern Art, NewYork; Museum of Contemporary Art Los
Angeles, USA; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
etc,.
Exhibition Duration
15 July - 1 September 2020, 10:00－18:00
( Closed on Mondays)
PIFO
Gallery concentrates on the participation of the course of Chinese
contemporary art and the exploration of post-war European master artists
and seeking for all possibilities of art power in the dialogue and
collision between the two aspects. As a major gallery in China
specialized in the study and promotion of abstract art, and also the
main institution to continuously explore the various possibilities of
figurative art at present, PIFO is convinced that the experience of art
emerges from the new world created by one revolution after another; The
artist's work is the third eye to explore the world. For collectors,
PIFO provides expertise and encourages them to explore their own unique
perspective because only the combination of the two can make a great
collection. We hope to see a growing number of collectors to take on
the roles of a connoisseur, with a more in-depth understanding of Asian
and Western contemporary art, and appreciate the artists discovered,
reshaped and firmly believed in by the gallery.
Junfang Shao shaojunfang@pifo.cnSophia Wang sophia.wang@pifo.cn
M: +86 18210011135
作者：偏锋新艺术空间
特别声明：本文为艺术头条自媒体平台“艺术号”作者上传并发布，仅代表该作者观点。艺术头条仅提供信息发布平台。
