Ijoma Mangold:
A Most Unlikely Character

I met the painter Armin Boehm at a small dinner that began very elegantly, with premier wines from the Rheingau and Bordeaux and a fantastic, well-aged côte de boeuf. While we were still standing in the kitchen and helping to chop onions, I was fascinated and puzzled at the same time—not so much by Armin himself at first, but by what he triggered in me: I had to focus on his words to avoid being too drawn into the spell of his physicality, his corporeality, the scars of which appeared to me less like marks of torment than like a higher, artificial kind of aesthetic self-recreation, paradoxically radiating something almost like a fountain of youth. I tried not to show it, because of course I felt both bad and ashamed that I was judging a person based on their appearance. So, while I was still trying to suppress my inner fascination as inappropriate, it was then that—fortunately!—something completely intellectual that, with even stronger force, managed to distract me from the external. In order to test the waters a little and establish a conversational framework, the way people do when they’re just getting to know each other, we chatted lightly about everything and anything. Suddenly, to my surprise, I realized that Armin, with quiet amusement and in a tone that made it all seem casual, was formulating theses, views, opinions, and thought experiments that also crossed my mind at times, but that I usually didn’t voice aloud for fear of offending anyone, and certainly not when invited to dinner. I felt that this evening was marked by an unusual openness. Anything could be said, anything questioned. You wouldn’t be arrested for anything. You didn’t have to worry that any phrasing would immediately be used against you. This way, you could try out your thoughts instead of instinctively suppressing them, for fear of being branded an outcast. It’s like this: the more playful the nature of a conversation, the more willing people are to retract the biggest nonsense they just came up with, without hard feelings. I was just trying it out. Science, everyone insists, thrives on trial and error. In the art of social conversation, it would also be to everyone’s benefit if more trial and error were allowed. This license to explore whether things might also be told in a completely different way, without immediately being labeled a conspiracy theorist, is what truly frees the mind from its timidity.

Whether Trump or Putin, whether MAGA or Russian revisionism, whether the AfD or the three-party, so-called traffic light coalition that was in the process of tearing itself apart, whether social media or the “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.” movement—we pondered it all at this lively dinner table: Is there another way of seeing this thing? And could it be that those who see things very differently also have their reasons for doing so?

Armin Boehm, PEUR DE LA MER, 2026

Speaking without restraint, in any case, broadens our horizons and stimulates curiosity. Since that evening, we’ve been sending each other links whenever one of us comes across a new idea somewhere in the vast expanses of the Internet. We’re by no means always in agreement, but actually, it’s not about opinions at all; rather, it’s about escaping the conformity of a certain dominant narrative of reality, one that always knows exactly which phenomenon belongs in which drawer. And once placed there, it has to remain nicely preserved, because otherwise moral reality would become too ambiguous. And nothing seems harder to endure in our present than moral ambiguity. And this is especially true in the cultural and media sector, which complacently considers itself a bastion of intellectual openness and fearlessness, yet all too often brims with self-similarity and homogeneity. Sometimes, when Armin’s interventions overwhelm me because he forces me to question a position I thought was secure in its absoluteness, I wonder how he managed to survive in the art world with his stubbornness and provocativeness without being excommunicated. But perhaps my own prejudices against the art world are themselves just a convenient cliché. One has to be able to admit mistakes sometimes...The fantastic Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once said in a famous essay about “the danger of a single story”: If there’s only a “single story,” only one valid, canonical narrative to explain all worldly phenomena, then it will be a tight squeeze for the actual diversity of a world made up of individuals who, at their best moments, aren’t even identical to themselves.

When Armin and I get together to rack our brains over world events, he likes to say: “It’s about the cubist perspective. You have to look at things from different viewpoints, only then will you understand that they’re not simply one way and not another.” The cubist perspective is not simply a style familiar to us from art history, but also a method of understanding the world, so that we avoid falling for the danger of a single story.

Armin Boehm, THE MONOPOLIUM CONFERENCE, 2026

And of course, this cubist perspective shapes many of Boehm’s paintings as a literal motif—sometimes almost like spotlights, focusing from one eye in one direction and from the other eye in the opposite, as if cross-eyed. And if the eye reflects the soul, as the Romantics were convinced, then there are often at least two souls in one face.

As in the Portrait with Two Realities, in which an elegant man wearing a yellow jacket and fine wingtip shoes sits on a chair while one half of his body is covered by a sort of transparent shower curtain. But because what serves to conceal is itself transparent, it makes the side of the body it covers appear all the more vividly in a dazzling, intangible way. Concealing and revealing are two moments of the same movement, in which more than one reality then comes to light.

The well-managed balance between now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t is, after all, a social technique to gain something from society without being consumed by it. Boehm’s characters also often present themselves as if on a stage, yet at the same time remain impenetrable. The half of the face that, in the case of this image, is distorted into abnormality by the optical refraction of the shower curtain is interestingly also the more delicate, mysterious, vulnerable, and open half of the person sitting on his chair with a slightly melancholic sense of being lost.

Armin Boehm, it seems to me, is driven by curiosity about the world. And there’s a general rule: the more perspectives we develop, the more of the world we can partake in. The philistine leads a boring life because he always already knows what’s right and what’s wrong. The cubist perspective dissolves the moral clarity of the picture we make of the world—and in this sense, Boehm’s paintings are ambiguous, shady, and profound.