Armin Boehm: The Evil Eye

Exhibition catalogue edited by Hilke Wagner
texts (German/English) by Martin Engler, Gregor Jansen, Veit Loers, Gabriele Sand, and an interview with Armin Boehm by Sarah Frost
144 p with 120 coloured illustrations
275 x 220 mm, clothbound and embossed

ISBN 978-3-940953-20-9

(out of print)

The Little Poison Kitchen

Around the turn of the previous century, and before the First World War, the avant-garde would also draw upon ideas from the fields of theosophy and anthroposophy. And so it was that a blatant esotericism also permeated those extremely convoluted texts by Kandinsky or Mondrian, forming the intrinsic make-up of a scientifically exact abstraction.
In his first large catalogue publication for his solo show at the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Armin Boehm presents a dark, impasto form of painting that acknowledges such occult and parascientific border areas, and which seems to hover in some supposedly dead, almost gothic-seeming, liminal space, by building layer upon layer and moving from light to dark tones, with the result that shimmering flashes of the natural coloration of the polychrome ground finally burst through the dark mixed technique. With his portraits, interiors, and landscape paintings, Armin Boehm takes up the circulating images of terror camps, military bases, and »poison kitchens«, and unreservedly links them to planetary spaces, comets, and constellations. It is as though the »evil eye« is simultaneously elucidating and bamboozling us with the mass media image of a new unconscious, in the terrifyingly beautiful splendour of established mastery.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Braunschweig, 27/06–30/08/2009