Armin Boehm｜Maximum of Intensity in Beauty,Cruelty or Complexity
Interview Video
意志与表象的世界
Die Welt der Wille und Vorstellung
上海狮語画廊
Leo Gallery Shanghai
艺术家｜阿明·勃姆、牟桓
Artists｜Armin Boehm, Mou Huan
策展人｜沈奇岚博士、马丁·恩格勒博士
Curators｜Dr. Shen Qilan, Dr. Martin Engler
展期 Duration｜2022.11.12-2023.2.26
武康庭｜上海徐汇区武康路376号
Ferguson Lane｜ 376 Wu Kang Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai
主办：狮語画廊(中国)&彼得·科尔西曼画廊(苏黎世)
Organizers: Leo Gallery China & Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich
Artist Interview｜Armin Boehm
Armin Boehm‘s studio, Berlin, Germany
Leo Gallery: Your works often use diverse materials, such as fabric, paper, and even asphalt, which gives your works a different kind of richness. How did you first find your way to the right materials?
Armin Boehm: I have always been much concerned with how the surface of a painting affects the human nervous system. A painted picture is like a skin, something vulnerable and sensitive - something that tells a story. The older a person gets, the more interesting his skin becomes. It has scars and wrinkles at the end of life. I have always tried to use different materials to create a vivid pictorial surface that relates to life in our time.
Armin Boehm
Portrait of Markus, Mubhi and Dog
Oil, Asphalt on Wood
80 x 58cm, 2008
In the beginning, I simply tried to sprinkle pigments on the wet oil paint. Then I cut out fine paper collages and use them to glue the sharp silhouettes of trees into the painting. At some point I took scraps of fabric from my tailor to the studio. With these I could paint with scissors, so to speak. I cut out the colored fabrics and applied them to the canvas. A new layer emerged. Maybe a kind of skin on the skin, maybe just an industrially manufactured and dyed Versatzstück* (fragment, set piece) what defines the rhythm of the image.
Armin Boehm‘s studio, Berlin, Germany
Leo Gallery: It is said that you sometimes use fabric as a "patch" to revise the mistakes of brushstrokes. How do you decide which mediums to use and how to arrange the layout of various materials in a work?
Armin Boehm: The fabric surfaces do not hide any flaws. But they have a colorfulness that I can not mix. They are artificially dyed. They are industrial fragments, I can only determine their shape with scissors. The fabric collages are, in a way, foreign bodies in the picture that I have to respect and to which I have to react with the color. They are like stones in a river, the water must flow around them and around the contrast of hard and soft creates a beautiful aesthetic effect. To stay in the image, stones in water give structure to a river. The fabric collages give my paintings a structure and a rhythm. There is also something musical about it.
I often collage pieces of clothing, petals or parts of the faces of my figures.
The effect must be used wisely and must not become an end in itself.
Armin Boehm
Wunsch
Oil and Fabrics on Canvas
70 x 50cm, 2016
Leo Gallery: In terms of composition, your works have been described as "kaleidoscopic" in their complexity and dazzling content. Where do you get your creative inspirations from? How did you develop this unique personal style? What aesthetic movements influenced you as you grew as an artist?
Armin Boehm: I have always been a very experimental child. I was always interested in how different styles or fabrics relate to each other. I always had a great interest in chemistry, biology, fashion and politics. These are all areas where interactions between inorganic materials, living things, culturally influenced clothing or political ideas can be observed. I have also always enjoyed comparing historical eras.
Europe was always a continent that was influenced by all the major other continents because it was a center of trade. Many influences from all over the world were culturally amalgamated here.
Die Welt der Wille und Vorstellung
Leo Gallery Shanghai, 2022
And because Europe, in turn, is made up of many small individual cultures, it was perhaps also possible to differentiate this style mix here in an extremely diverse way with artistic movements. Personally, I was interested in German Expressionism and its influences from Africa. The masks or the exotic study trips of the painters of that time. Urbanity, that is, big city life, also found its way into painting. The big city is actually a kaleidoscope in appearance; billboards, neon signs, signals, faces, shadows, artificial lights, architecture and fashion mix into a kaleidoscopic arrangement of colors and shapes. My painting is certainly influenced by my life in the big city.
Armin Boehm
From Father to Son
Oil and Fabrics on Canvas
46.5 x 46.5cm, 2019
Leo Gallery: Many of the characters in your work appear as "multi-faceted", with faces that are either ethnically different, or seem to be androgynous, or a combination of two characters on the same face, while they also seem to have a certain comic character. Why do you portray the characters in this way? What kind of point of view do you want to convey through this?
Armin Boehm: I think I'm also portraying the influence of digital media on social and individual life. Societies are often torn apart by it. Today, you have a virtual me and you have a private me. The virtual sphere is partly permeated by almost medieval beliefs that see themselves as progressive ideologies. I think this is because religion hardly plays a role in our society anymore. The modern ego is torn between its cerebral sphere (which we increasingly seem to live in) and the fact that it still walks around in a body that occupies a 60,000 year old design that has instinctual needs. That' s animalistic!
A tragic modern figure emerges that I find aesthetically very appealing and therefore I paint it. In terms of the Internet, I fear that everything somehow degenerates into a big joke. Often clownish humor is the right strategy to capture reality in art. I used to dislike humor in art.
Armin Boehm - Involution, Galerie Perer Kilchmann
Zurich, 2018
So, in a way, I see my new portraits and comic-like depictions of people of our time as realism. I see myself at times as a kind of clown and then again as a chronicler.
Leo Gallery: Many of your works reveal strong political attributes, and these political elements appear very clearly in your works, including, but not limited to, the painting of words such as "House" and "Brexit" and the direct portrayal of political figures in your paintings. When did you first become so interested in political themes? What motivated you to dive into this topic in your art? Do you intend to convey your own political views and stand through your works?
Armin Boehm: I started this political series after a long stay in the U.S. I observed a completely torn and politicized society. Actually, it had nothing to do with politics anymore - according to my observation, it was about more or less radical beliefs. It was no longer about understanding the other perspective. This was completely new to me at the time and shocked me so much that I felt emotionally compelled to paint a "political" picture. I would never transport my own political conviction in a painting because I have never seen myself as an activist.
Armin Boehm - 1,2,3 Soleil, Culver City, US, 2016
But I wanted to describe with my painting what I read in the media and heard in the discussions. Similar to the description of the big city above, the political ideas around the world also have different symbols, colors and symbolic figures. Therefore, it suited my painting approach that I portray social life. The world of media, the internet and social media are also kaleidoscopic. Fascinatingly confusing. My paintings are arrangements of symbols that exist around me. Sometimes I think there is a parallel to Hieronymus Bosch of whom also no one knows what he thought about his time.
Armin Boehm
Teils-Teils
Oil, Fabrics and Paper on Canvas
73 x 74cm, 2014
Leo Gallery: In addition to political issues, your works also focus on contemporary technological innovations, including the appearance of robots, artificial intelligence, and other imaginations of the high-tech world in the future in your paintings. How do you think the technological developments of the 21st century have influenced your work and life? What’s your opinion on where the technology development is heading to?
Armin Boehm: As I said, I like to compare different eras. Basically, I'm totally relaxed about the development of new technologies. Stanley Kubrick has already said everything about the tool character of modern technology in his film 2001 a Space Odyssey. An artist will never be able to say it better in a picture.
In the German Expressionism at the beginning of the 20th century there were great fears, because one did not know whether it was healthy for the body to travel so fast with a train. Today there are great fears about artificial intelligence in Germany.
Armin Boehm
Gorea
Oil on Wood
29 x 36cm, 2008
I think technology is always a challenge for the human brain. Today, we are much more at home in our cerebral sphere than in our physical sphere.
We are just living in an age of change again. In the knowledge society, the IQ of the human being is possibly becoming more and more important. Artificial intelligence and robotics will have an effect on us like evolutionary selection factors - we are condemned to further development. Many science fiction authors have seriously dealt with this topic and are still laughed at by the conservative and sometimes very complacent cultural establishment. I appreciate science fiction very much. Social media and the Internet, television series and memes have engaged a painting much more in the last 15 years than the classic book, for example.
All artistic disciplines, painting fashion film, music and literature are actually playful processes and will always integrate new technologies into play.
Armin Boehm - 1,2,3 Soleil, Culver City, US, 2016
Leo Gallery: You have been described as "the painter of modern life". Beyond political and technological issues, your works also seem to be reflections on the bohemian or subcultural aspects of modern life. Are you personally interested in unorthodox lifestyles? How do you see the place of this part of non-mainstream culture in contemporary German society? Has the cultural climate in Berlin influenced your tendency to focus on this?
Armin Boehm: In my university studies in Düsseldorf, I was always strongly influenced by the French fin de siecle literati and the decadence movement. Joris Karl Huysmans, Balzac or Oscar Wilde were important for me. In Germany, Gottfried Ben came along. I like the idea of looking at imperfection and the morbid facets of existence aesthetically or poetically. Maybe that's the last remaining refuge of art.
Armin Boehm
L'eau se change en mémoire
Oil and Fabrics on Canvas
190 x 130cm, 2014
In Germany, the position of the somewhat eccentric outsider is not quite as popular as it is in Romanic or Anglo-Saxon countries. Berlin has become increasingly boring in this respect. Everyone there wants to connect art with a goal that improves the world. In other words, to give art a purpose. In the final analysis, however, art must be measured against the achievement of its goals. What happens if it does not achieve its goals? Is art then abolished? I deeply distrust these people and prefer to be an outsider.
But I live a fairly low-key, middle-class life, go to the studio at the same time every morning, paint all day, hardly drink alcohol, go to the gym regularly, and play a lot of golf. I attach a lot of importance to being well dressed and like to spend my money on good design and fashion. I am better dressed than the rest of the city. So I am so already far from the mainstream in Berlin...;-)
Die Welt der Wille und Vorstellung
Leo Gallery Shanghai, 2022
Leo Gallery: You have said that you seek "maximum of intensity in beauty, cruelty or complexity" in your works, and it is true that we have witnessed a difference in emphasis in your different series, from the chaotic political satire to the more subdued still life series. Do you think there is a conflict between these three pursuits? How do you balance the different styles?
Armin Boehm: I've never been interested in developing a fixed style that is instantly recognizable everywhere. I consider the idea of one's own signature to be conservative late capitalist folklore. I work like a film director or like a musician; each series of paintings finds its own experimental aesthetic because, after all, the subjects and motifs are different. I can't portray the portrait of someone sitting across from me in comic style, and conversely, I can't portray an abstract political figure like someone I'm intimately close to. I want to believe what I do myself. When I paint the political "world" I have to find other forms for it than when I paint my introspective feelings. When I paint a picture about the death of my very young sister, I have to do something in painting that I have never done before, because I have never experienced the situation. The subject and the painting itself develop a life of their own; demand empathy from me. Sometimes you can't just go into a routine mode. I always want to do something new, whether the gallery owners or collectors follow me is for me secondary.
Armin Boehm
Dreamcatcher
Oil and Fabrics on Canvas
100 x 80cm, 2016
Leo Gallery: You and Mou Huan were both students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and both studied under Immendorff. Did you know Mou Huan before? Can you tell us about the influence of Düsseldorf Academy and Imendorf on you? How do you see the dialogue between yours and Mou Huan’s works in this exhibition?
Armin Boehm: Yes, I have followed his work! I have always looked at the paths my fellow students from the Immendorff class have taken. Years ago I have also painted similarly reduced like him. So I worked at the interface between pure abstraction and figuration. Not as close to our common master as I am sometimes aware of today.
Armin Boehm
Solve et Coagula
Oil, Asphalt on Wood
80 x 58cm, 2008
When the times in which we live became socially radicalized I had to give up my distance to Jörg Immendorff. I didn't like his political painting at all before.
I radically rejected politics and society as a subject. But when the social issues in Berlin became so fascinatingly interesting, I began to take an interest in his painting technique! I dared to make social life the subject of my paintings. To pack so much information into a picture that it becomes an abstract all over in the end. The information checkmate each other. In the end, the picture is almost abstract again.
Die Welt der Wille und Vorstellung
Leo Gallery Shanghai, 2022
The time at the Düsseldorf Art Academy was the decisive period of my life. I came from the country, from a bourgeois background with no connection to art. In Düsseldorf I felt an artistic atmosphere and around the many discussions about painting, fashion, film and music I developed an idea of my own artistic experiments. For four years I hung out only with young artists and successful artist professors. That was already incestuous. A closed radical world. There were no activists among the students at that time who brought in political demands. We were able to occupy ourselves with art in peace. Today, that is no longer possible at many German art academies. I am glad that I had this time under Immenorff, Klapheck and Lüpertz.
Leo Gallery: Do you have any expectation and message for the exhibition in Shanghai?
Armin Boehm: My message to Shanghai is that painting is an archaic, original and universally understandable form of expression among people. Our teacher Jörg Immendorf had already said in the 90s how important China will be, an ancient culture with which we have to exchange with. I am glad that his words have now become reality in my life.
About the Artist
Armin Boehm
Armin Boehm, born in Aachen, Germany in 1972, studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Konrad Klapheck and Jörg Immendorff. He now lives and works in Berlin.
With a mesmerising use of color that draws visible psychological relationships across his compositions, Boehm embeds his subjects into a prismatic world of figuration, symbolism, and cultural reference. 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 materialising in concrete space.
Boehm’s work was featured in exhibitions in many famous galleries across multiple countries like Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, the United States and other. His works have also been exhibited at Art Basel Hong Kong, the Armory Show in New York, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Cologne and other major international art fairs.
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