Franz Ackermann

Biography

Franz Ackermann makes exuberant paintings and installations centred on themes of travel, tourism, globalisation and urbanism. Combining the factual precision of traditional street maps with his own interpretation of the local environment, his works document the artist’s perception of the great cities of Asia, South America and Australia. His large-scale dynamic installations 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.

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 Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe (2014), Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2013), Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires (2012), Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2009), Kunstmuseum St Gallen (2008), 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). Important group exhibitions include Altermodern: Tate Triennial (2009), Tokyo-Berlin / Berlin-Tokyo, Mori Art Museum and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2006), Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, Remote Viewing (Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Drawing from the Modern, 1975–2005, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005).

Biography

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