Franz Ackermann - Mental Maps
Mental Maps, his first major series, were produced during a stay in Hong Kong. Combining the factual precision of traditional street maps with his own interpretation of the local environment, these small watercolours documented the artist’s perception of the great cities of Asia, South America and Australia. Ackermann has since created large-scale dynamic installations that are built up from individual components comprising paintings, drawings, photographs, wall drawings and sculptural, billboard-like constructions. His work frequently deals with the double side of tourism – the glamour, speed and consumption of international travel but also the detritus, architectural scarring and garbage that it leaves behind, and his installations often take on the appearance of strange advertisements for a global tourism industry run amok. The places he depicts have a generic quality, and yet they look strangely familiar: non-places where the traveller’s desire replaces the local culture. His most recent White Cube exhibition, ‘Home, home again' (2006) brought together a series of large-scale paintings, drawings and sculptures that focus on London as their point of departure. Ackermann presented a large-scale drawing that provides a metaphorical link between his ongoing ‘Mental Map’ series – watercolours made while on the move in hotels around the world – and his paintings, constructed from memory in the studio.
Franz Ackermann is known for his paintings and installations based on interests such as tourism, globalisation, urbanism. Although, I don't paint within my practice, or create installations similar to his, the mental side of his work, the way he thinks and experiences urbanism and tourism intrigues me the most. I could to a certain extent argue that psycho-geography is like becoming a sort of tourist when you experience cities and different places, as you look, listen and breathe the city in - taking it all in, record constantly.
Yet, on the other side, there is this binary opposition attitude opposite to Psycho-geography, where some people develop a blase attitude to a place, or a city where it is extremely crowded and dense - they withdraw themselves from the wonders of the place. However, developing a blase attitude to a place is opposite to someone who experiences instead - means that they are still experiencing it with their body and mind, just detaching themselves away from the realisation of it.
