ARMIN BOEHM
METROPOLITAN NOTEBOOK
SCHLACHTER 151, BERLIN, GERMANY
12 SEPTEMBER – 31 OCTOBER 2025
OPENING
11 SEPTEMBER 2025 | 6 – 10 PM
The works in METROPOLITAN NOTEBOOK bring together drawings and paintings on paper as well as charcoal on canvas – fragments of Armin Boehm’s visual diary, in which the artist’s gaze turns both inward and outward. Some of the sheets were created as studies, others as oil paintings on paper, executed in Boehm’s characteristic collage technique.
The absorbent quality of the paper lends the surface of the paintings a watercolor-like appearance – fragile and delicate, yet at the same time uncompromisingly direct in subject matter and in the sharpness of collage.
Portrait Armin Boehm © Photo by Martin Mai
At the core lies the metropolis as a field of experience: Berlin as an urban stage, a mirror of social dynamics, and a projection surface for personal encounters observed or lived by the artist. The figures that emerge are lovers, friends, strangers, or protagonists Boehm knows only by hearsay and has chosen to portray. Alongside them, animals and plants appear – almost as stand-ins for the familiar characters that populate his visual world: cats, dogs, birds, floral still lifes, or forests.
In one forest painting, figures lie on the ground as if asleep, watched by dogs yet seemingly invisible to two people in the foreground. As in an earlier work from 2023, the inspiration comes from a story heard in a massage salon. A masseuse friend told Boehm about the war in her native Thailand and about a forest near her home where the dead of that conflict were buried. She recalled that dogs would howl there at night, because they could see the souls of the dead. These souls wandered restlessly, unable to comprehend where they were, buried far from their families. “Sometimes, in a twilight state – just after waking or while drifting into trance on the massage mat – such images come to me, either through my own dreams or through the stories of others.”
Other figures posed as models in the studio, painted face to face in moments of longing, grief, or romantic attraction – or simply sketched during the quiet of a lunch break. Some sheets resemble love letters, while others are psychologically biting, almost surgical studies of power relations between the depicted characters.
The perspective remains ambiguous: at once brutally direct and analytical, yet again and again dreamlike, poetic, almost naïve – like an urban fable. These and other anecdotes that Boehm gathers in the city condense into a kind of METROPOLITAN NOTEBOOK: a diary in images that oscillates between New Objectivity and fairy-tale symbolism. It reflects both the psychology of modern urban life and the political and emotional currents that shape our present. Or perhaps it is simply a playful approach to experiences that are inseparably bound to this city.