Franz Ackermann (b. 1963)

Franz Ackermann (b. 1963)
O.T. (Untitled)
signed and dated 'Franz Ackermann '05' (lower right)
graphite and collage on paper
15 x 23¼in. (38 x 59cm.)
Executed in 2005

Provenance:
Galerie Adamski, Berlin.
Private Collection, London.

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Specialist Notes:

Conveying the experience of a tourist, rather than a traveller, Franz Ackermann’s practice is rooted in his globe-trotting expeditions from Tokyo to Rome and Bangkok to São Paolo. His works express the dizzying sensory overload experienced when taking in the sights and sounds of a foreign place. Treading the perennially walked paths of tourist itineraries, Ackermann assumes the position of a contemporary flâneur, scavenging the world's cities in search of diverse, exotic impressions.

Executed the same year as his solo exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 2005, O.T. illustrates the artist’s relationship with the Irish city as a tourist, like a scrapbook of memories from his minds’ eye. Indeed Ackermann's small-scale mixed-media sketches, which he calls 'mental maps', develop from his wanderings. The maps configure delirious, almost hallucinatory, impressions of familiar locations which, having left their traces in memory, regain form in abstract sketches and photographic collage to form echoes of tourist spots through fragments of architecture and landscape.

Ironically though, Ackermann’s works do not present to us the tourist sites iconic to the city, but its ‘non-places’ and activities, those spaces and objects which are ubiquitous in every tourist city but unique to none: youth hostels, bus timetables, tour operators, souvenir shops and tourist maps. Indeed it is the experience of these 'non-places', devoid of history and anonymous, that provides Ackermann with his main subject—an ever-shrinking world that, paradoxically in its accessibility, is becoming increasingly homogeneous.

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