Franz Ackermann, Black Hand Monument (2013/14), via White Cube

Known for his chaotic and dense compositions of color and imagery, Franz Ackermann has been depicting utopian realms that have never been and will never be approached. Glorious and pompous in his use of color, Ackermann orchestrates a wide range of materials to create what could be summarized as the heroic underlying of chaos. By combining photographic elements and schematic color arrangements as his primary tool, Ackermann presents an array of topographies of non-existing lands.

Franz Ackermann, 9 X 9 X 9 (Installation View), via White Cube (more…)

Franz Ackermann, Walking South (2012), courtesy Faena Arts Center

Before installing the site-specific Walking South at Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, Franz Ackermann walked, trained, biked and bussed across the city for two months. Once, he took the train to the outskirts of the city and walked the same distance back, all part of his psychogeographical plan to map the city.

The result is a 260-square-meter (equal to ten highway billboards) multi-layered, 25-panel installation bursting with Ackermann’s emotional response to the landscape, dirt, people and air of Buenos Aires. Black and white photographs of buildings, cars, and street corners are a somber base for bright, unexpected shapes that extend from a busy center node, which is a tangle of red, blue, and grey tentacles growing from jellyfish-like bodies. These irregular bodies float among and encircle photos of reality, both connecting and confusing the viewer.

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Installation View via Artdaily.org

Currently on view at White Cube Gallery, 25-26 Mason’s Yard, is the exhibition of new works by a renowned German artist Franz Ackermann, titled Wait. It is Ackermann’s third exhibition at the White Cube, this time including not only his signature large-format canvasses on display on the lower level, but also an newer installation occupying the ground floor of the gallery.

The installation, which consists of artwork produced in the variety of media, centers around the painting titled ‘Citizen,” depicting a disproportional goggled face of a military pilot.   Among other components of the installation is a spinning wall-mounted painting, with seven deadly sins written on its frame, a video and chunks of raw wood randomly placed on the floor of the gallery.

More text and related links after the jump….

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