LOCAL
An exhibition by Franz Ackermann
Thomas Eller
Curator Thomas Eller (Left) with Artist Franz Ackermann
“Let me send you a location! –There is no better way of getting here”, I tell the artist Franz Ackermann. “Ha des sagsd du so leichd...”[1], he replies. But he does not use social media apps. The messages he usually sends are typed in a way that makes them sound like his vernacular local Southern German idiom and he delivers them via classic SMS text messages. Very old-school for someone, whose artist career started in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s. Since then Franz Ackermann has been traveling far and long –spending months and months on the road, mentally mapping out the spaces he has covered.
His `Mental Maps′, as he calls the works he creates while traveling could not be more different from what one expects from a map –for starters: orientation. Were it not for WeChat locations, there are many places in Beijing, that would be very hard to find. Just a few years back, getting to artists′studios required multiple phone calls, while driving towards the destination. Today, with constant triangulation, the systems we all use, know exactly, where we are in a space, mapped out so precisely, that sometimes one can even find the exact location of the apartment of the person, who has sent us her information.
So maps are made for people, who don′t know how to find their way …but is this all?! Maybe more importantly, maps record demarcations, borders between countries, nations, provinces, and municipalities, ultimately deciding on which governance and jurisdiction you are under. But also, if you have property and own land or real estate, maps on record guarantee and secure your ownership. Maps are used to keep unwanted people out and keep them from infringing upon your own territory.
There is one conundrum though. Landscapes change all the time. Trees grow, rivers bend differently every year, mountains erode, lands slide, streets are moved, and new buildings are erected every year. During baroque times in Europe there has already been an obsession with maps. It was the time when people dreamed of having maps of original size so as to keep record of everything that changes in the world over time – which of course was impossible then. It is today that, with digital technology, we are so very close to the goal of recording the world at an original scale, when all changes can be registered almost even in real-time. Maps are man′s phantasy of controlling the world and everything inside.
Now Franz Ackermann. He was born into a village of just 6000 inhabitants in 1963 in the South of Germany. He studied in Munich and then Hamburg, the South and the North of Germany, only to use the first opportunity to escape far away to Hong Kong. He made his world big, showing his works in galleries and museums around the world in the following years. But he also stayed absolutely focused. And in as much as maps are absolutely useful, they are NOT the way we perceive reality, they have very little to do with how we navigate cities, villages, and the countryside on a daily basis.
First of all, land- and cityscapes are fraught with meaning. When we move around, there are places we feel attached to. Maybe it is just a restaurant, we like, or the school we went to, or an important historical building, or the place of our first break-up…. Places are connected to emotions. And that changes over time. We all know this of course. Coming back to a very familiar place after many years, we all are left a bit disorientated. Two things have actually changed – the place itself, but also our emotional connection. So inevitably it takes some time to reconnect to places. Which means that landscapes, maps, are actually containers of our emotional investment. We walk through our everyday, not knowing how much we need this kind of familiarity with our environment to create normalcy. The fact, that the streets are the streets we always walk/drive through, are the streets, we know for days on end, can be boring on the one hand, but also gives us the sense of belonging. Because, if the streets are there every day, I am there too. It might be boring, but it is also reassuring.
The fact is also, that every day, we miss a lot of what is going on in our streets. We just don′t pay attention. Which means one of many things: Landscapes are projections of desires and interests. We know, what we like, and we see, what we are interested in. The in-between is completely obscured –we just don′t see or remember it. Which might change. Coming back to a place years later, we might be interested in different things and we experience the same place differently. This will, at first, give us a strange sensation of unfamiliarity, before we can successfully reconnect with a place.
Again Franz Ackermann …he understands ?connection“. That is all he is concerned with. He has a level of perfection in that, which is almost uncanny. Looking at his work and more precisely the layering of his work, one sees the effort he invests on working out the “intensities” of the experiences he made throughout his travels. Experience, perception, and intensity are the three stages of his methodology. And when you look at the world through this lense, continuity is a lesser concern. How places are related is not so much an Euclidian, mathematical approach, which could locate you at any given moment (as your smart phone does) is not so much of interest. What is more important is how we relate to our immediate surroundings and how we can familiarize ourselves with it.
Franz Ackermann′s works follow these basic directions and let you experience just that. His `Mental Maps′are mostly small-scale watercolors made during his travels, in hotel rooms, on the train, etc. They function as sort of recording devices, on which he takes notes of the intensities and significant objects and locations he encounters during his daily walks through the cities he visits. So in a way every Mental Map is a result of an action, of Franz exploring the places he travels. A lot of them incorporate many different vantage points and follow poly-perspectival principle to reveal the complexities of the social, cultural and aesthetic fabric of the cities.
Another methodology of Franz Ackermann is what he calls `Evasions′, mostly very large-scale oil paintings that were developed in his `sedentary′mode of producing work in his studio. “Evasion, as a foreign word, means, in contrast to invasion, nothing other than a forced escape; basically one must get away, now, out of a however defined inner necessity, one has to get out, no matter how”, so Franz Ackermann. In other words, his larger-scale paintings are continuations of his travels, while he is back in his studio. These paintings share the basic visual language of the `Mental Maps′, but can be much more complex and can become collages of drawing, painting, and real objects. Brightly colored shapes offer the emotional charge and shaped and cut-out panels add dimension to the picture plane and open up to deeper layers often containing photographic prints.
Franz Ackermann @ PIFO
The visual density of Ackermann′s work translates his experiences into art. One can witness an artist that cannot sit still for long. For the most part he travels – but he is not the kind of person that travels to get lost. He is the person that arrives, he is someone who is present.
The famous writer Taiye Selasi gave a TED talk a few years ago. Being born in Britain of Nigerian and Ghanaian descent, she was fed up with the question of where she came from. In an effort to put things into emotional perspective, she countered these questions with another one: Where are you local?
And this is what counts in human life. Where are you local? – Where are you emotionally invested? –This is what the work of Franz Ackermann is about. He spends months at a time in places he wants to explore and understand. But, as humans understand their environments, it is sketchy, uneven, invested, unjust, interest-driven. Whichever way you would want to describe this, reality, REALITY, is a product of individual interpretation at first. This is what Franz Ackermann zeroes in first. He is not interested in the communal, political, official ?truth”. He takes license and the liberty of hazarding his very own and personal views of what he deems worthy of recording in his art.
Franz Ackermann @ PIFO
That is his strength. … How does he do this?! – From where does he take his confidence? – The answer is very simple: He believes in himself and his immediate experiences. It does not matter how far he travels, he is always local. He comes from a small place (and sends messages in his local idom) and he travels to far away, big places – and he does what you should do as a human being, he tries to relate.
And in-as-much-as reality is not a seamless continuum, neither is Franz Ackermann′s work. He pokes holes into his images in which one can see “aspects”, localized intensities, represented by documentary photography at one point in time, but also drawings on occasion. His `Mental Maps′are constructed in way that gives us a very clear understanding of how differently our perception of reality really works in relation to a publicly prescribed version of the state of the art.
[1]“Ha, das sagst Du so leicht“, would be the proper phrase in German. English: ?Huh, this is easy for you to say.“?
相关阅读 Related link:
偏锋 开幕 | 弗兰兹·艾稞曼中国大陆首展3月21日亮相北京偏锋新艺术空间
偏锋 现场 PIFO On View | 弗兰兹·艾稞曼 Franz Ackermann
关于画廊 About Gallery
偏锋新艺术空间成立于2006年,是中国专注于抽象艺术研究与发展的主要画廊。坚持对中国当代艺术进程的洞察以及对欧洲战后艺术大师的探索,并在两者的对话与碰撞中寻找各种可能的艺术力量。偏锋深信艺术的体验产生于一个又一个的变革中创造的新世界。艺术家的作品,正是探索世界的第三只眼睛。对于收藏家,我们为其提供专业知识,鼓励他们发掘个人独特的视角,只因两者的充分结合,才能构建卓越的收藏。我们希望更多的藏家可以秉持鉴赏家的心态,更深入的理解亚洲与西方的抽象艺术,以及欣赏画廊发掘、重塑并坚信的艺术家。
PIFO Gallery was founded in 2006. Which is China's premier gallery to present abstract art. PIFO brings together the works of contemporary Chinese artists with European post-war masters. At PIFO we believe that the experience of art is profoundly transformative. Seeing the world differently through the works of artists is an inspiration. We encourage our collectors to develop their individual vision and share our expertise in art to help them build excellent collections. The goal is to spread connoisseurship for Asian and Western abstraction in art and deepen the understanding and appreciation for the artists that we (re-)discovered and believe in.
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