Armin Boehm

ICH SELBST, WENN ICH ECHT BIN (MYSELF, WHEN I AM REAL)
May, 2024

This is the first presentation in Latin America by Armin Boehm. His showcase presents fictitious and spatially impossible scenes, based on urban layouts and architectural constructions, that are meant to evoke the inner human condition. The images, which sometimes appear to be aerial views or perpetually receding landscapes, explore the idea of natural and manmade borders in geographic surfaces. His most famous works are large-scale paintings, constructed using complex combinations of materials including fabric, oil paint, pure pigment, metal, and sand. A majority of Boehm’s paintings have dark palettes and depict nocturnal views with small sources of light; in preparation for exhibiting his paintings, Boehm has been known to paint the walls gray and dim the lights to deepen the experience of darkness. Other subjects have included interiors, smashed trees, bucolic scenes, and car wrecks.

In his works on canvas, he uses the technique of collage to conjoin fragments of paint, fabric, paper or metal, substances from which his subjects emerge, almost sculpturally materializing in concrete space. Boehm’s picture worlds reveal specific incidents that seem timeless in their quintessence. Still lives, private cocktail parties, scenes on the beach or in public bars stand beside personal moments of seclusion. All are informed by an atmospheric intensity evoking both intimacy and alienation. The vocabulary of modernism is present in both form and content. Boehm adopts the approach of the German Expressionists and their avantgarde literary tendencies.

Armin just received the 50,000 euro Tiemann-Preis for contemporary painting by The Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.

Colector.