'In [Boehm’s] visual imagination, Black Paris becomes a place of buds and blossoms, of tendrils and liana, in which people live out their lives at the boundaries of their dreams.' —Dr. Wolfgang BeckerAn emphasis on place, history, and identity forms the conceptual foundations of German-born Marion Boehm’s arresting portrait practice. Through her unique collages, Boehm examines the historical interfaces and exchanges that still persist between the African continent and Western culture today. After a visit to the Soweto township, Boehm was struck by the people that she met and the recycling of materials that she observed there that she began to create portraits, as Paul Laster has recently described in more detail: ‘Initially creating mixed-media collages from the black and white photographs that she took of the locals by altering the portraits with pencil, charcoal, pastels, paint and bits of torn paper, before long Boehm was adding fabric and found objects to make her portrayals even more elaborate, and thus more lifelike. She then began to use photos of people from the colonial era and portraits from contemporary times to blur the line between the past and the present.’i
Executed in 2017, Evans belongs to a body of work that looked closely at Paris as a centre of African diasporic culture, focusing on the musicians, writers, dancers, and painters who have contributed to its rich culture over the years. Luxuriously patterned and textured, Evans is highly characteristic of Boehm’s work in its sensitive engagement with a history of craft practice, notably the tradition of African wax printing, introduced in the 19th century from Indonesian Batik workshops and quickly spreading across the continent. Working with a variety of materials and filling her collaged canvases with an array of details Boehm asks us to consider the role played by material culture in the complex and intersectional histories of our increasingly globalised world.
Marion Boehm ́s work has been collected internationally. Her artwork was presented during shows and art fairs in South Africa, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Morocco, Portugal, Luxemburg, Switzerland, and the United States. Most recently, Boehm has shown work as part of the Texture Summer Group Show and presented a solo exhibition of works, Embrace at Barcelona’s Out of Africa Gallery in 2020 – 2021.
