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Franz Ackermann
Franz Ackermann makes exuberant paintings and installations centred on themes of travel, tourism, globalisation and urbanism.
'Mental Maps', his first major series, were produced during a stay in Hong Kong. Combining the factual precision of traditional street maps with his own interpretation of the local environment, these small watercolours documented the artist’s perception of the great cities of Asia, South America and Australia. Ackermann has since created large-scale dynamic installations that are built up from individual components comprising paintings, drawings, photographs, wall drawings and sculptural, billboard-like constructions. His work frequently deals with the double side of tourism – the glamour, speed and consumption of international travel but also the detritus, architectural scarring and garbage that it leaves behind, and his installations often take on the appearance of strange advertisements for a global tourism industry run amok. The places he depicts have a generic quality, and yet they look strangely familiar: non-places where the traveller’s desire replaces the local culture. His most recent White Cube exhibition, ‘Home, home again' (2006) brought together a series of large-scale paintings, drawings and sculptures that focus on London as their point of departure. Ackermann presented a large-scale drawing that provides a metaphorical link between his ongoing ‘Mental Map’ series – watercolours made while on the move in hotels around the world – and his paintings, constructed from memory in the studio.
Franz Ackermann was born in 1963 in Neumarkt St Veit, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He has exhibited extensively internationally, including solo exhibitions at Irish Museum of Modern Art (2005), Kunsthalle Basel (2002), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2000) and Portikus Frankfurt am Main, Germany (1997).
More on Franz Ackermann
| Artworks | |
 | travelantitravel 2 Images |
 | Kunsthalle Nürnberg 4 Images |
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| The Occidental Tourist by Douglas Fogle | |
| Ireland, Ackermann and the Erasure of Toponymy by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith | |
| Exhibitions | |
| Home, Home Again 21 Apr—20 May 2006 | |
| Pacific 5 Jun—11 Jul 1998 | |
| Editions | |
| City Planning 10: The Hotel Entrance Edition of 25 | |
| City Planning 12: Terminal Edition of 75 | |
| City Planning 9: The Oak Edition of 25 | |
| Artist's Publications | |
| Franz Ackermann 2005 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.cmoa.org/interna... Carnegie Museum of Art, New York | |
| http://www.imma.ie/en/page_... Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin | |
| http://www.saatchi-gallery.... The Saatchi Gallery, London | |
| http://www.tomiokoyamagalle... Tomio Kayama Gallery, Tokyo | |
 | Back to Artist Index |