2024-10-29 15:34:00
Armin Boehm follows in the tradition of Otto Dix and George Grosz. He plays with media images and paints disturbing portraits of our overstimulated society. To balance his sensory overload, he goes golfing. But this game also has its pitfalls.
“Golf can be an exciting and frustrating sport at the same time,” says Armin Boehm, pulling three hard-boiled eggs from his bag and biting into a fried chicken sandwich he had just prepared himself in the restaurant kitchen. The chef and his mother, who run the club’s restaurant as a couple, despite the stress of preparation are indulgent with hungry regulars, are putting ducks in the oven and preparing curry sausages with potato salad; Golf appears to be a strenuous sport, even if Boehm leaves his balls intact for now.
The afternoon tournament at the Berlin Prenden Golf Club has been brought forward by an hour. Also at the urging of Boehm, who briefly hugs the coach and knows that at the end of the season, in October, the sun will disappear relatively soon above the tops of the pine trees. And although here, 40 kilometers north of the capital, only a relaxing nine-hole round is on offer, golf is not a game you want to play at sunset.
“I’m wasting time with one Handicap of twelve,” Boehm flirtatiously on the way to Driving rangewhere nearly 20 players practice their tee shots. Twelve and over Par it’s far from bad Handicap – doesn’t work without golfer’s Latin – for an amateur golfer. The statistically determined shot rate not only describes a player’s potential, but also allows golfers of very different abilities to play together and against each other.
The artist began learning the complex technique of the golf swing nine years ago. “I’m very ambitious,” he says, “and I always want to get under ten.” This is the magic limit, his ambitious tournament colleague will later say, who for his part was limited to 17 due to lack of energy.” formation.Handicap he dropped back and a few more balls Coarse will hit, that is, the grassy areas to the left and right of the carefully mowed one Fairways Brandenburg, disheveled, wizened in the slightly undulating landscape.
He was so ambitious when he painted that he tensed up. “I have always despised the painter as a businessman,” says Boehm, although he at least admires the business painter of the early 1990s, Markus Lüpertz, who ostentatiously parked his Rolls-Royce in the no-parking zone in front of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, due to its busy attitude. He was not accepted into Lüpertz’s class. Boehm was not discouraged, he learned to paint from Konrad Klapheck and became a master student of Jörg Immendorff.
Armin Boehm: “Golf is a psychological game”
The cramps of the early years have long since disappeared. Armin Boehm is one of the most famous German painters of his generation. He was currently exhibiting an exhibition of his most recent paintings at the König Gallery in Berlin. Now he can experience the playfulness of his art much better. But he would like to be even more playful when it comes to golf.
“I think about technology too much when playing,” Boehm says and picks up a laser measuring device to measure the distance to the T-boxthe tee box, to the hole flag on the Green determine. You can read the length of the golf course on a sign that also shows what it is like, where the sand pits hide or where one of the ponds threatens, where you would like to know how many balls lie at the bottom, but this is not the case. It doesn’t matter: Not only does the golf swing and paint depend on technology, the sport also depends on equipment.
“Only bad golfers think about how to hit when they play. “It’s completely destructive,” Boehm says, bringing it up Driver and pushes the ball about 200 meters towards the hole. He doesn’t seem entirely satisfied. Finish the course with five shots instead of four, one Bogeymanthis is what it is called when a player needs an extra shot to hole out Scratch-Golfer, ideally Par play. “Golf is a psychological game.”
Boehm’s teammate also struggles with himself – “Dude, are you afraid of the tree instead of swinging properly?” – when he fails to bring his ball, which fell into a birch grove, back into this psychological gamethe chip. We are constantly disappointed by this sport of failure, explains Boehm, because from the flight of the small golf ball we see “how thought and action are connected”.
Boehm goes golfing to relax. However, thinking and doubting is something he does a lot when he paints. His painting does not seem like that of an artist who can easily detach himself. They are overflowing and figurative paintings that can be seen in his exhibition “Lust Fear Pain Ecstasy”. Allegorically disconcerting, sometimes drastically crude, sometimes satirical images of people, androids and vampires, comic book heroes and pop characters.
Some give birth to monsters, others play cards. Sometimes the hallucinatory Renaissance paintings of Hieronymus Bosch come to mind, then again the prophetic diagnoses of the Weimar Republic by Otto Dix and George Grosz. Armin Boehm calls his associative images “social portraits”.
He is fundamentally suspicious of collectivism. Boehm appreciates the controversy among individualists. Even in painting. The “fodder” for this is news, tweets and Insta feeds, keen observations in the woke art bubble and, above all, conversations with people outside this detached bubble. The subjects of his photos are often masked and appear to be involved in a parody.
“Boehm takes the penchant for masquerades to the extreme,” writes the art critic Wolfgang Ullrich, “he exaggerates and satirizes what happens in today’s society and its social media until everything becomes a disturbing farce, but everything here appears comical ”. , grotesque and absurd and allows you to find that long-awaited distance from your present.” Boehm promptly returns the favor and also mentions the cover of Ullrich’s new book in his images.
The present in Boehm’s images is saturated with quotes and codes. We see a Trumpian Mickey Mouse as a puppeteer on a sinking ship, we see Janus-headed poker faces at the casino table, capitalists, socialists, whores, monsters in wheelchairs everywhere, backgrounds from New York, Moscow to Berlin. The titles further obscure the mysterious encounters in the images.
“Autoda-fé”, for example, the term actually describes the judgment of an inquisitor, which is usually followed by the burning of the culprit. In the image of the same name we see a group of boys holding a man who raises his fist upwards in an iconic pose after surviving an assassination attempt. His face resembles that of a presidential candidate less than that of the Internet meme “Pepe the Frog,” whose originally harmless smile has become the face of identitarian right-wing extremists.
“We are experiencing an epochal change. “I actually wanted to call the exhibition ‘War’ because of all the culture wars in our divided society, but also in view of a war of political symbols,” says Armin Boehm, recalling discussions about Russian Zs, pig noses or rainbow flags. “For me art is always communication, never agitation. My photos appear aggressive, but there is also something conciliatory in them.”
Deciphering them is exhausting; their disharmonies, toxic also in terms of color, create such overstimulation when looking at them that you want to rub your eyes. But looking away should, to paraphrase Duchamp, allow you to look more closely. In any case, it is not surprising that the creator of such images also seeks balance in seeing.
On this sunny and windy October afternoon at the golf tournament to certify each other’s handicaps, we succeed. Even if the ball flies into the uncut grass and you have to look for it for minutes. Then suddenly it lies there, bright white, next to a toadstool, like something out of a picture book.
“Paintings are successful when they fascinate.”
To immediately end up in a sandpit, golfers even in peacetime Bunker appoint. And even if thanks to a nice put of several meters on the shortest green he rolls straight into the hole, Boehm complains laughing: “Once again Bogeyman!“
Having one randomly Little birdso finally below Parthere are probably too many thoughts running through your head. To his sick father. If the exhibition is good. How a planned gallery conversation with aesthetics professor Bazon Brock on the effect of images will end. Boehm would later contrast the philosopher’s endless flow of thoughts with his free-floating contradictory associations, which he brought to the canvas as images: “They succeed as paintings if they fascinate.”
The ninth Green it was not successfully punctured one last time in a completely reckless manner. THE Handicap It couldn’t get any better this late afternoon, but it didn’t get any worse either. The golfers hoped for a “good game” before the first tee of the tournament. The same goes for art appreciation – a great game!
was born Armin Boehm 1972 in Aachen. The visual artist has lived in Berlin for more than 20 years and has been playing golf for almost ten years. Jörg Immendorff’s master’s student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy has become known for his allusive figurative paintings that draw on the collective memory of symbols and codes, prominent people and comic characters, situations and Internet memes.
His images, often political, also refer to the history of art from Hieronymus Bosch’s Apocalypse to the New Objectivity. Boehm once called himself a “realist in the digital Middle Ages.” The galleries Peter Kilchmann in Zurich, Francesca Minini in Milan and König in Berlin represent the artist.
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