Franz Ackermann - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 15, 2008 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance


    neugerriemschneider, Berlin

  • Catalogue Essay


    Franz Ackermann’s futuristic canvases are derived from the artist’s perception of 21st Century urban living.The artist’s entire body of work is about traveling, tourism, and the appropriation of places. Considered a map-reader, creator, tracker, collector, and a real roving observer, Ackermann’s abstract works reflect upon a greater system–an imaginary topography that questions the excitements and concerns of urban life, globalization, and the increasingly interconnected specifics of disparate locales. Ackermann’s canvases simultaneously map real and imaginary places, capturing the fantasy of escape while making political gestures about the erratic state of cosmopolitan life. Ackermann has commented about his work, “When I make art, social and political questions overlap with my interest in communicating certain experiences” (Franz Ackermann quoted in U. Grosenick and B. Riemschneider, eds., Art Now, Cologne, 2002, p. 14). Using vibrant colors, architectonic forms, crisp lines, and cartoonish abstractions, Transall Delivering a Piece of My Hometown comments on how quickly the world changes around us. Bringing together the good and the bad of modern civilization illustrates the artist’s ability to construct illusory points of view that combine details from far-flung places with intimate memories close to home, as seen through the lens of the city. The artist explains, “The place itself is the trigger and never the image,” (Franz Ackermann quoted in U. Grosenick, ed., Art NowVol 2, Cologne, 2005, p. 14). In the present lot, Ackermann constructs a quixotic landscape both unsubstantial and visionary in its appeal.

148

Transall Delivering a Piece of My Hometown

2001

Oil on canvas.

109 1/2 x 187 1/4 in. (278.1 x 475.6 cm).

Signed, titled and dated “Franz Ackermann ‘01Transall” on the stretcher bar and signed and dated again “Franz Ackermann ‘01” on the reverse.

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

15 May 2008, 7pm
New York