Wolfgang Ullrich

Against the Impositions of the Present: Armin Boehm’s Society Portraits

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In a 2019 interview, Armin Boehm said that we are “possibly […] living in a digital Middle Ages.” 1 That this statement is not exactly to be taken as a compliment to the present should be apparent. But Boehm is not only suggesting that civilization may have regressed from standards once attained; he is also considering whether painting today might have a function similar to that which Hieronymus Bosch once probably fulfilled best. Is it not therefore once again a matter of painting figures of the times “ugly [in order] to reproduce them faithfully” and at the same time “to distance oneself from their deformed appearance”? All the supposed fantasy in Bosch’s paintings, indeed the many drastic details and creepy creatures, would then have to be understood as a kind of defensive magic. In this way, the artist tried to keep at bay the impositions of his present, which was dominated by fanaticism and fears. And Armin Boehm sees himself in a comparable role: as a painter, he mobilizes apotropaic energies to banish the “extreme polarities” that he currently experiences as particularly oppressive and to create, at best, “an ideology-free space” in his paintings.