| Franz Ackermann |
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 Gregor Jansen Franz Ackermann – Urban VisionsThe landscape has changed. Our forests, fields, meadows and pastures, the mountains and the seas, the coastal regions, and above all the cities, the vast industrial areas and the accumulation of a heterogeneous, randomly thrown together checkering of middle-class architecture have, as a whole, resulted in new ways of seeing the continental and thus global territory. When traveling by train or car what we generally encounter as a quantative experience is, in the case of the recent spatial transformations, a qualitative one. This aesthetic chaos originated within a short period of a few years right before our eyes, and occasionally the apathetic eyes of politics, thereby creating a melding of cities within the Ruhr conurbation. This local territory escapes at regular intervals into the global surge of tourism, which extends the space less or, more slowly, transforms landscapes. Our yearning for the most part reaches out to distant spaces and their signifiers, which are guided by or else correspond to subjective expectations, but which in each of the respective territories produce mostly the same signs of fatigue that we are familiar with at home in our multi-layered lifestyles. The inhabited territories of cultivated architecture are de-territorialized above all in Europe, and transformed into a curious one-dimensional layer, quasi reduced – and not only here – to a surface. What interests Franz Ackermann is the way in which this disequilibrium of space and society, in its transitional phase, is possible to methodically capture. In this sense, he is far more than a “mere” painter. At once tracker, map-reader, collector, decoder and draftsman, he is a cosmopolitan researcher who collects heterogeneous formulations, which, in the role of peripatetic observer, he then consistently finds ways of interpreting, much like a sort of ground-level satellite, in that he sees his world additively in forms and colors. Remaining true to his native country, and bearing his relationship to his region clearly in mind, he captures perspectives for himself and for us, which could otherwise never be gleaned from satellite pictures or maps. Ackermann searches for new logical equivalents between the things of space, the words which we attach to these things and the mental pictures that we project onto them. Since the onset of the 1990s, Franz Ackermann has crafted small-format drawings on his numerous journeys; Mental Maps, in a way, which could be likened to a kind of travelogue with which he constructs and deconstructs phenomena. Later on, having returned to his studio, Ackermann went on to create Evasionen [Evasions], layering large-format oil paintings (organically and spatially illusionary) onto a single plane and, in 1997, produced Evasion XIV – now of the Landebank Baden-Württemberg Collection – his first wall painting for Nordhorn. He then commenced work on the moulding of entire spaces, or rather spatial modules, in 1998. Evocative pictorial sequences, produced as endless design studies, and which take their cue from filmic narration, are frequently supplemented by photography, ultimately as a virtually surreal montage with a certain focus on the political. By means of an organic language of forms, Ackermann presents for discussion layers of an architecture of thought, which, in using space as a membrane, analyses the reciprocal relationship between space and architecture through to tourism and politics in the medium of the interlocking surface of painting. [...] Catalog excerpt "Extended. Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg" Editors: Lutz Casper, Gregor Jansen, published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2009 ^
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