Lena and Johann König:
Preface to Armin Boehm's STARKBILDMALEREI

Armin Boehm, MOT À MOT, 2026

We share more with Armin than just work. In our biographies, there are moments where perception suddenly ceased to be taken for granted—moments where identity became fragile and had to be put together again. Perhaps our closeness also lies in the fact that, for both of us, the mirror changed at some point—not because it broke, but because the person who looked into it was no longer the same.

Armin’s images aren’t mere provocations. They are constructions made from fragments—like biographies that reorganize themselves after a rupture. His figures carry within them superimpositions, multiple expressions at the same time, several states in a single face. Vulnerability and aggression, irony and earnestness, ecstasy and exhaustion. Berlin is also such a superimposition. St. Agnes is exemplary of this. The church was built in the center of a city utterly destroyed. In the ravaged heart of Berlin, in the 1960s, a sacred space made of concrete emerged—not as a nostalgic reconstruction, but as a radical statement. A new beginning from the ashes. Today, this place is no longer a house of God, but a space for art. Its history is inscribed in the architecture—in the severity of the concrete, in the silence of the space, and in the fact that, here, form has emerged from destruction. It was exactly here, in an exhibition by Armin in St. Agnes, that this magazine came into being—from what was apparently a chance encounter with Bazon Brock. A conversation between concrete walls, between theory and painting, between metropolitan iconography and the present. A moment in which many things converged: biography, urban history, image politics.

Berlin has always been a projection surface. For ideologies, for desires, for doomsday scenarios. Armin adds no illustration to this history—he makes it permeable. In his images, Weimar and timeline, historical imagery and meme culture, figures of power and comic avatars encounter each other. The victors of visual history stand side by side and once again vie for attention. He doesn’t moralize. He exposes. Armin Boehm doesn’t paint isolated scenes, but rather social choreographies. His figures form groups, create sight lines, and build tension as if they were moving through a dense urban framework. Interiors open up to city spaces, and city spaces condense into psychic landscapes. Social rituals, desire, power games, and loss of control don’t appear as separate themes, but as different states of the same reality. In this sense, his paintings represent metropolitan painting. They’re tableaux of a world in which bodies, roles, and ideas constantly reposition themselves. He shows how images work. How they’re susceptible to instrumentalization. How they survive. And how we recognize in them our own projections—or how we lose them.

Berlin was, a hundred years ago, a laboratory of extremes. Berlin today finds itself once again in the same situation. Back then, one’s gaze moved staccato through streets, advertisements, bodies. Today, it moves staccato through feeds, streams, and headlines. The overload is different—and yet the same. In St. Agnes, this building that rose from the rubble of the city, Armin’s pictures stand like new paintings of a nervous era. Not comforting. Not cautionary. But demanding. They require attention—not as consumption, but as an attitude.

We are happy to bring this magazine into being together with Armin. Not despite the ruptures in our biographies. Not despite the history of this place. But for these very reasons. Berlin is nervous again. The world is nervous again. And perhaps now is exactly the right moment not to look away.

Armin Boehm, THE END OF POLITICS, 2026

Lena König:

“Books, bosoms, images, trees”—these are what Bazon Brock needs to survive.

It’s the 2000s, and Brock’s lecture on the idea of happiness, three times as long as announced, is shaping my student days in Vienna. While lining up in front of the bathroom at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, I hear a familiar voice behind a door, speaking on the phone, a monologue about the necessity of planning in everyday life. The door opens, Brock grins: “If you want to keep listening, you’ll have to wait until this evening.” I wait. That evening, Bazon Brock, Harald Falckenberg, and Jonathan Meese take the stage. Brock speaks. The scene fluctuates between earnestness and excess—a mixture familiar to denizens of the art world. Strange things are happening around him, but Brock, oblivious to it all, continues to speak. It’s about Monte Verità, the “Mountain of Truth,” and about Ascona, a refuge for pacifists and artists during the First World War.

Long did the idea of Berlin as a place of refuge prevail. Today, the city is perhaps less a retreat than a compression chamber—a place where contrasts become visible and new images emerge. Brock was one of the first people we led through a dilapidated church in Kreuzberg, at a time when Johann and I were considering what could be made of this place. St. Agnes has by now been renovated, and Brock is sitting at one of the conference tables, having got a splinter from the rough wooden surface, discussing his enthusiasm for the painting of Armin Boehm. He talks about how this mode of painting captures the feeling of the city—its chaos, its darkness, and the strange attraction that these exert on people.

Armin Boehm, WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR, 2026

What fascinates me most about Armin’s paintings is that they don’t simply depict this city. His figures rarely stand alone. They form groups, observe one another, get into conflicts, or form fleeting alliances. Their gestures and glances seem like part of a choreography—a social movement in which desire, power, and insecurity become simultaneously visible. Many of these events take place indoors: in restaurants, in clubs, in apartments. But these interiors never remain stable. They become city spaces, nocturnal facades, windows… This is how painting dedicated to the metropolis is created. Painting in which images, roles, and identities are constantly rearranging themselves.

The eruptive moments that appear in some of Boehm’s paintings—the chaos, the loss of control, the sudden violence—don’t appear as isolated events. Rather, they’re the reverse side of the same social order.

Thank you, dear Armin, for the moving exhibition that followed this conversation, and for your belief in this city. Entrusting you, following Juergen Teller, Alicja Kwade, and Ayako Rokkaku, with the next carte blanche for a special issue was a clear and obvious decision. And it was just as obvious that we would invite Bazon Brock to help shape this dialogue.