Franz Ackermann - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 17, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Operating at the intersection of international politics and mass tourism, Franz Ackermann’s drawings, paintings and environments offer a multi-faceted view of the 21st century urban metropolis. His watercolors are dense studies in which aerial cartographic perspectives, minutely rendered architectural details, teetering city-scapes or geological fault lines collapse together amidst intricate swirls of paint. Small enough to fit into a suitcase, he calls them “Metal maps” and makes them only when he is traveling, as a form of ‘visual diary’. The paintings, in contrast, represent not only a change in scale but a switch from the cerebral activity of his tightly executed drawings to the physical demands of painting with oil on a canvas often considerably taller than he is. Here, fragmentary architectural elements and nodes of activity provide dizzying multiple perspectives held together only by vivid swatches of color in centripetal patterns. The physical aspect of traveling, of a body moving through space, is as vital to Ackermann as the intellectual faculty which recognizes the “foreign”. He completes his journey by finally rooting his work firmly in his destination, transforming museum or gallery spaces through bold wall paintings that extend the psycho-geographic territory of the paintings and drawings. But a coy relativism is often implied through the inclusion of an emblematic self-portrait, mock-heroic in stark graphics, or a sleeping bag left on the floor to symbolize the lonely, possessionless nomad, the imaginative individual alone in a complex world.” (U. Grosenick, ed., ART NOW Volume 2, New York, 2005, p. 12).

24

Tastie Break

2006
Oil on canvas.
19 7/8 x 27 3/4 in. (50.5 x 70.5 cm).
Signed “Franz Ackermann ‘06” in the reverse.

Estimate
$60,000 - 80,000 

Sold for $72,000

Contemporary Art Part I

17 May 2007
7pm New York