Franz Ackermann

Franz Ackermann - Student of Bernhard Blume; art professor in Karlsruhe

Franz Ackermann was born in Neumarkt-Sankt Veit in 1963. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich for four years from 1984 to 1988 before studying under Bernhard Blume at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg from 1989 to 1991. In that last year, a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service enabled him to study in Hong Kong. Just ten years later, in 2001, Ackermann was appointed Professor of Painting at the Karlsruhe Art Academy.

The Mental Maps: A plan for art

During his visit to Hong Kong, Franz Ackerman got his hands on a 13 x 17 cm Chinese notepad for the first time and sketched his impressions of the colourful, lively metropolis. These sketches were to become one of the most important tools for Ackerman's art. He continues to produce the so-called Mental Maps to this day, preferably on the tried and tested small format, either as watercolour or gouache sketches, which feature ornaments, cartographic elements, abstract and broken forms, colour games and sometimes even almost realistic architectural views. He created fifteen of these paintings while travelling in Asia.

The one and the many: Art in large dimensions

Franz Ackermann not only masters the small, but also the large. For an exhibition in Berlin in 2014 under the motto Painting Forever!, he transformed an entire hall into a colourful picture installation, for the creation of which he directed a whole host of assistants with a mixture of spontaneous improvisation and ingenious planning. Disturbing elements were simply "painted away" with Ackermann’s typical light-heartedness and energy, with a joy in taking risks and a radicalism in the battle of shrill colours that only the imperturbable giant from Bavaria possesses. Metre by metre, he created his own world, which could only be seen in this particular form once and only in Berlin, because after the end of the exhibition, the individual paintings were removed and the painstakingly applied murals painted over. Incidentally, the artist had named it Hills and Doubts, but nobody really wants to believe that Franz Ackermann doubts what he is doing, for the forms flow far too firmly and energetically from his hand.

A painter of the world and a philanthropist

Franz Ackermann received prizes and awards for his pioneering work, including a nomination for the coveted Hugo Boss Prize 2004 and the "mfi Preis Kunst am Bau 2005" for the design of a wall in Munich's Georg Brauchle-Ring underground station entitled The Great Journey. In the meantime, the artist's life has also become a great journey: Franz Ackermann travels around the world, is constantly on the move, hurries from exhibition to exhibition and wins people's hearts with his unpretentious manner and his art of shapes and colours with almost unbelievable ease. The artist was already sociable and charming in his Hamburg days, when he would lean against the bars of the Reeperbahn in a crowd of followers and lecture on his art theories. Naturally colourful, naturally entertaining, naturally Bavarian. Incidentally, Ackermann still plays football - but only with his old school friends.