Naherholungsgebiet ( Public Park) and Map of the World

A restless traveler, Franz Ackermann sustains his artistic investigations through continuous voyages, particularly to large cities in Asia, America, and Europe. Ackermann is interested in the forms that structure urban organization, searching for the codes and symbols that shape public language in the contemporary world. Naherholungsgebiet (Public Park), 2000, is from the oil-on-canvas series Helicopters, aerial views of urban centers that look like motors radiating energy. The composition, within which various architectural structures are recognizable, is layered on different planes and seems to extend infinitely. Fields of psychedelic colors define details that, while specific, could belong to any urban center. The view of a possible center from which the action radiates outward is contradicted by the equal weight given to each part of the work, just like the contemporary geography of large metropolises, where no single place can be identified as a unique center, and where the periphery is continuous.The idea of travel as a liberating intellectual experience, is instead explored in Map of the World, 2007. The installation repeats the exact shape and dimensions of a small garden shed that George Bernard Shaw used for writing in solitude without straying far from his house in the village of Ayot St. Lawrence, England. Nicknamed “London,” the shed allowed the writer to work undisturbed and to claim, without being able to be contradicted, that he was elsewhere