"Rather than depicting the world, Armin Boehm constructs one. Material, colour and gesture become the conditions through which painting generates its own reality."
Die schöne Jugend brings together a selection of recent paintings by Armin Boehm, presenting an evolving body of work in which painting continuously expands its own language. Bringing together works in oil, textile and mixed media, the exhibition considers how material, colour and gesture operate not simply as descriptive tools, but as active components in the construction of pictorial reality.
Over the past decades, Boehm has developed a distinctive visual vocabulary characterised by distorted physiognomies, theatrical figures and layered compositions. While these recognisable faces remain present, they no longer function as isolated protagonists. Flowers, animals, interiors and still lifes increasingly assume equal psychological and formal presence, dissolving conventional distinctions between pictorial genres. Rather than introducing new subjects, Boehm allows familiar motifs to enter into new relationships, where each element continually reshapes the meaning of another.
At the centre of the exhibition lies the proposition that painting is capable of constructing its own reality. Material, colour, gesture and textile coexist within each composition, allowing the paintings to unfold as autonomous environments rather than representations of the external world. Humour, uncertainty, tenderness and contradiction remain in continuous negotiation, producing works that resist singular interpretation while maintaining remarkable formal coherence.
As visitors move through the exhibition, familiar motifs gradually shift their role and significance. Portraits become emotional structures rather than likenesses. Flowers acquire psychological weight beyond their traditional symbolic associations. Domestic interiors emerge as spaces of imagination rather than description. These transitions are never abrupt but unfold through subtle transformations that reveal the flexibility of Boehm's pictorial language.
Rather than proposing a rupture with his earlier practice, Die schöne Jugend presents the maturation of an artistic language that has become increasingly open, generous and structurally nuanced. The exhibition invites viewers to experience painting as a dynamic field in which perception remains fluid and meaning is continually renegotiated through the material intelligence of the medium itself.
