Franz Ackermann's paintings adopt the modern superficiality of pop. Festive colours beacon with package holiday promise, merchandising traditional ways of life as luxurious folly. Shapes and patterns spiral out of control, topsy-turvy buildings contort as perilously as property developers' investments, landscapes are swallowed up by industrial vortexes and nature fights back with toxic sunsets and concrete waves.Inspired by the phenomena of urban generation, globalism and cultural commodification, Franz Ackermann is a contemporary explorer, scavenging the world in search of exotica. His abstract paintings act as travelogues, recording his often tragicomic impressions of the locations he visits. Psychedelic explosions, toxic smog and flat-packed landscapes offer an apocalyptic view of an ever-shrinking world. Packaged with candy coloured pop graphics, Franz Ackermann's paintings operate like international tourist logos, remapping the planet in user-friendly info-bytes for easy, if not palatable, consumption.



creates a biotic abstraction, a template for natural phenomena dictated by design. His jumbled composition is harmonious in its turmoil: concentric patterns of colour expose hints of identifiable place (a street map, a building interior, a snippet of landscape) only to dislocate them in a maze of organic generalisations.Constructed graphics are corroded, integrated as if by evolution, to incorporate somatic qualities: sublime contemplation is achieved only through artificial enhancement.Franz Ackermann, the Berlin painter and draftsman, is one artist who set off on endless trips around the globe prior to the onslaught of the adventure trend. Big-city chaos and the boondocks - the cartographic works he created throughout his travels now hang in international museums and collections, including that of the Deutsche Bank.