Franz Ackermann
Our Houses
Following on from his Paris exhibition in 2016 exploring international metropolises, Our Houses draws on the European capital’s energy and transforms the gallery space with a combination of mural paintings, imposing oils on canvas, and a series of small format works on the city of Brussels.
Over the last twenty years, Franz Ackermann has created a body of work that draws on his personal experience of travel and of his encounter with architecture and the urban space. His mental maps use a mixture of sensations and memories of the global cities he has explored. They then feed into his installations and large, vivid paintings where architectural constructions and organic rhythms meet.
With Our Houses, Ackermann tackles the realm of the intimate. The house, both a physical and mental object, a metaphor for the individual and her/his aspirations and relationship with the world, contends with a hallucinatory vision of today’s urban realities. Behind the exuberance of the works, this encounter between the private and the global subtly questions the wariness of our European societies, where the sense of hospitality and sharing is vanishing.
The Local, 2019
The artist
Born in 1963 in Germany, Franz Ackermann lives and works between Berlin and Miami. Travel as an experience, displacement and observation are the notions at the heart of his paintings and installations. Ackerman’s exuberant works with their saturated colours are inhabited with overlapping forms that merge with fragments of images taken directly from urban reality. Globalisation and the issue of tourism also play an important part in his artistic explorations.
