Bazon Brock on Armin Boehm:
Berlin Iconography Between Deception and Humanism

Armin Boehm, BOULEVARD NEWS, 2026

Balancing Beam: The critical contribution of artists to social development has been and continues to be to show that people need not rely on being bound by religions or ideologies—for example by moral concepts or notions of God or worldviews that everyone is impelled to accept, but that people, as if balancing on a tightrope in their lives, can give themselves stability through what they themselves are able to sustain. Nothing supports them from outside; instead, they remain upright by their own strength.

Armin Boehm, IO ET LUI, 2026

Deception: City dwellers move through streets guided by expectations constantly disrupted by reality. Boehm’s paintings, the movement of gaze, anticipation and emotion encounters no hierarchy between the expected and the unexpected; both appear with equal pictorial legitimacy. In urban reality, one may well be able to see through various signs dictating commands and prohibitions and discern what is expected. But specific metropolitan goings-on, their unpredictability, are precisely determined by deviation from what is commanded and prohibited: traffic accidents, theft, murder and manslaughter, rape, fraud, and deliberate deception. Although painting is also subject to the phenomenon of optical illusion, with forgery, and with the deliberate deception of authorship and time of creation, a painting can be held accountable for what it represents, namely, offering itself as a unity of perception and imagination. With artists’ visualizations (from the map, to the model, to the city plan), it is not possible in the reality of the metropolis to create a blissful unity of imagination (of the good life) in ordered relations that dovetails with the actual perception of daily life in the big city. Unlike the common notion that images produce deception and illusions, the confrontation of painting and metropolis shows that it is not painting that is the medium of ideological or illusionistic deception, but the real circumstances to which the images refer: pickpockets, for example, put forward an illusion to passersby addressed in order to go undetected when stealing their wallets. If iconographic achievements are transferred into reality, the result would only be an often misleading prejudice: that everyone who looks like the thief of our imagination must in fact be a thief. The example shows why in real life imagination and perception must not be reconciled, while they remain fundamental for painting or other forms of symbolization.

Armin Boehm, WAS WAR – WAS IST, 2026

No Image Bans—Standards!: Armin Boehm is a clever player, certainly a double agent, for the city and the image of the city—necessarily duplicitous, to the point where double standards becoming a virtue of the necessary artists’ propaganda. In his visual iconography, he exploits the fact that we are drawn more strongly to certain image motifs than to others, that we are more fascinated by breaking the rules than by following them. This raises the question of whether pornography is only attractive because society condemns it. This is, or was, similar with either horrific images of mangled bodies or vertigo—at any rate, throughout stretches of cultural development. The loosening or lifting of prohibitions largely diminishes their appeal due to a numbing effect that arises in the veritable flood of everyday fascination. This does not diminish the attractiveness of the paintings. On the contrary. Metropolitan iconography, as paintings, are generally works of an attractiveness unrealized in reality, because attractiveness consists in the unity of imagination and perception. If one today evokes the Berlin of the Roaring Twenties for artistic or entertainment purposes, for example, this is primarily successful when one recalls the visual iconographies of artists, filmmakers, set designers, and architects. In contrast, our view of the remaining realities of that time is significantly lacking. This confirms an old insight long understood by autocrats: their power does not survive in its consequences, but in the works of musicians, poets, painters, and architects who honor their deeds. Bans on images increased their appeal because the iconoclast actually confirms the power of art. The tolerant liberal, by contrast, often remains merely disinterested. Thus, metropolitan iconographers also provoke within the valueenhancing domain of prohibitions. Their counterparts in social reality today, across the globe, attempt—through the rigid enforcement of decorum and propriety—to increase the appeal of blood and testicles.

Bazon Brock and Armin Boehm © Courtesy of the artist

Visual Impact: If an image has an effect on the viewer’s mood or perception, it can be understood as being analogous to an intellectual operation: the viewer can perceive the effect of the image and position themselves in relation to it. A famous early example with Berlin iconography is Schad’s depiction of the reporter Egon Erwin Kisch undergoing an appendectomy at the Charité Hospital—while insisting on observing the operation himself via a mirror suspended above the surgical field. This is the basic concept of the relationship between artistic work and the perception of its effect. The images are, so to speak, mirrors in which one observes the effect of the images on oneself. In other words, images are mirrors over the operation field of perception.

Armin Boehm, THE HIRSCHFELD CONFERENCE, 2026

The Clownesque: Ah, that’s the clownesque. You think you can pacify wishing and wanting by performing a few foolish acts for people or entertaining them with amusing pranks. In child psychiatry in Germany today, this is common practice in every hospital. And it is quite clear that anything real is no longer perceived as real if wishing is relinquished to commodity propaganda. It and entertainment are the terror of our social existences. To escape these, there is only momentary rescue into the world of painting and its iconographic unity of text and image, of imagination and perception, or of artwork and concept of art. The literati optimize mental images, as do architects with perceptual forms, and musicians stimulate the enthusiasm for self-improvement among painters, poets, and architects. This is a true symphony.

Torrent of Sensuality—The Rule of Breaking the Rules: In a metropolis, one moves by constantly shifting one’s gaze in short glances sideways, as well as forwards or backwards. And in doing so, a staccato of iconographic units emerges. These units are the framework of Berlin iconography. Boehm’s paintings show that in the big city, one’s gaze can only be fixed for a very short time. Perception, drifting with the movement dynamics of pedestrians or cars, may be drawn to attractions as to triggers of sexual fantasies, but can only linger at these attractors for moments. Boehm’s paintings are constructed in the same way: no sedate orientation to the dominant motifs of the image, but a staccato of eye movement, as if one were not looking at the painting at all, but moving through it just as one moves through urban panoramas. The Futurists began experimenting with this method in the 1910s and 1920s, dissolving static states into patterns of movement. Boehm builds on this. Where Futurists simulated physical motion—cyclists in action, for example—Boehm sets things in motion as if on conveyor belts: panoramas of action without locomotion, cityscapes in stationary motion, horizons that move while remaining fixed, permanent refractions of light, snapshots that paradoxically express stability. These intensely dynamic motifs restrict eye movement within the image, in the way mountains limit the view of valley dwellers.

Armin Boehm, MODERN WARFARE, 2026

Why Universalism?: Capitalist commodity propaganda spreads without regard for cultural or local geographical particularities. It feigns a universal applicability, which, however, is the opposite of what European humanists understood by universalism. For them, universalism meant: all human beings share the same capacity to think, create and perceive; all possess equal mechanism of judgment. From this follows the immense wealth of differentiations in worldviews, social orders, and concepts of perception. The commodity propaganda of capitalism, in contrast, standardizes perception. It compresses the richness human knowledge into a narrow ideological spectrum: advertising. The universalism of fine art differentiates and continually creates from the equality of conditions new distinctions in artists’ concepts, while commodity propaganda standardizes perception across all ideas.

Armin Boehm, HEALING THE WORLD, 2026

Armin Boehm, THE ENDLESS RIVER, 2026