Wolfgang
Ullrich:
Armin
Boehm
and
the
Winners
of
Image
History
April 2026 by Wolfgang Ullrich
"I, at any rate, take the painting as a reminder
to myself to look rather than to interpret." – Wolfgang Ullrich
"I, at any rate, take the painting
as a reminder to myself to look
rather than to interpret."
– Wolfgang Ullrich
The collages made from Armin Boehm’s paintings and from images he photographed and collected invite closer inspection. With an analytical eye, one can identify motifs and relate them to one another. Those who engage with it will gradually notice how many different themes and subjects Armin Boehm explores in his painting. The photo collages also remind me of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas from the first decades of the 20th century, in which the art historian documented his eye-opening research. On each page of this atlas—unfinished and overflowing with material—Warburg highlighted a theme or motif by bringing together images from different sources and connecting them. His interests ranged from ancient coins and vases to medieval woodcuts and Baroque paintings, reaching further to contemporary stamps and press photographs of the time. Across genres and centuries, he observed how certain iconographies, patterns, and constellations repeated and were varied—with the aim of uncovering an overarching and in the best case universally effective visual vocabulary.
Armin Boehm, WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR, 2026
Armin Boehm’s paintings may already, in themselves, bring to mind Warburg’s panels. The pictorial space fractures under the abundance of details and motifs, indeed almost bubbling with images. As well, one sees images within images: on smartphones and on an easel, as views from windows, in the form of avatar-like—now mask-like—faces, or as references, primarily to figures from pop culture, whether it’s Super Mario or Heidi from the 1970s Japanese animated version of that tale. The image collages arranged around each painting further amplify Warburg’s vibes. For they, in turn, each provide a tapestry of superimposed motifs ranging from late medieval painting to cartoons; they reveal them the backstories for individual subjects in Armin Boehm’s paintings.
Apart from my educated-middle-class associations with Aby Warburg, I simultaneously think of contemporary phenomena when it comes to Armin Boehm, especially the use of images on social media. Here too, more or less well-known motifs are repeatedly addressed, varied and combined, posted and reposted, modified anew, or given a new meaning. Anything from the inexhaustible pool of images can be summoned and transformed at any time, and on feeds, blogs, and timelines, individual pieces come together so unpredictably and directly that a similar overall picture can emerge as in the collages surrounding a painting by Armin Boehm. Yet while a set of images in a Warburg atlas plate each owes itself to a single—albeit often unreconstructable—intention, the sequences of images on social media are contingent. This doesn’t, however, mean that they can’t be just as revealing in terms of the spirit of the times and broader social conditions. One feels continuously compelled to think about what they—individually and even more so in their respective combinations—reveal, what they might be symptomatic of, what they could symbolize. And the better-known they are, the more they become memes, the more significant they seem to be, having ultimately prevailed against the bold competition of other images. They’ve proven to be particularly versatile, suggestive, illustrative, and—according to the logic of the term “meme” from evolutionary biology—they’ve passed the “survival of the fittest” test.
As far as Armin Boehm incorporates many meme-ified motifs into his paintings, and one encounters Pepe the Frog just as one does characters from the Disney universe, along with Catwoman, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Donald Trump, he thus assembles champions of pictorial history. He subjects them to novel constellations in which they once again compete for attention. For this reason, the paintings also appear charged with vitality, which can simply seem colorful and seductive, but just as much threatening, martial, and harsh. It seems to me that in the face of Armin Boehm’s paintings, I can suddenly clearly grasp what I otherwise only sense: the enormous force of what is described far too matter-of-factly by the term “content,” the dynamics of escalation and uninhibited behavior that have been overturning all standards, all order on social media for several years. Avatars and other disguises have thus, not least, become users’ necessary protective gear against attacks, hatred, and bullshit, but in turn contribute to even more emotional superlatives. Just look at the torn and garish faces in Armin Boehm’s paintings. Aren’t they all manifestations of terror in the face of a world bewildered by algorithms?
The significance and urgency—the aesthetic power—of the individual subjects is highlighted in the paintings, as it were, thus becoming the subject itself. While the motifs are otherwise presented with a clear message, often as memes with an aggressive punchline, and are targeted within the platform where they appear, Armin Boehm offers them a stage beyond any semantic fixation. Pepe the Frog is, for him, not currently a declaration of allegiance to the alt-right movement in the USA, but equally not a stance in favor of the protest movement in Hong Kong, and Mickey Mouse appears “just so,” not packaged for any of the numerous memes for which this character has already been used.
Armin Boehm, BOULEVARD NEWS, 2026
Instead of venturing into activist terrain himself or even stirring sentiment for or against something, Armin Boehm provides a panorama of figures and motifs that are “Main Characters” in the digital-global contemporary world. In doing so, he aligns himself less with the tradition of political moralists like Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Jörg Immendorff (one of his teachers) and more with Max Beckmann, who, in his paintings, gathered myths instead of memes, allegories and symbols instead of pop cultural motifs, and brought them to life charged with meaning—that is, then, without semantic concreteness! And he stands precisely in the tradition of Aby Warburg, who also didn’t use the works of art collected in his atlas to articulate his own worldview or political stance, but who was, on the contrary, fascinated by the fact that the same motif could mean something completely different at different times or in different cultures, and how—and who wanted to understand what characterizes a form or composition so that it can be imbued with meaning at all. That these collages remind me of Warburg’s atlas, I therefore take as a warning not to treat Armin Boehm’s paintings as if every motif had a fixed, decipherable meaning. To do so would be to ignore that Boehm chose the motifs because they’ve proved to be dominant and capable of being instrumentalized, and not because he wanted to use them himself to convey a specific message.
Another characteristic of the collages can illustrate that Armin Boehm’s images are not decodable, and indeed don’t contain any more or less hidden messages that could be uncovered with careful observation and some education. In the collages surrounding individual pieces of his paintings, there are repeatedly images with motifs that don’t appear in the paintings at all—not even in an altered or very liberally referenced form. They may have triggered associations with Armin Boehm or, like parts of a mood board, served as an atmospheric foundation for a painting process. But perhaps he also wants to draw attention to the fact that every motif, whether screenshot or photo, can transform to the point of being beyond recognizability while making its way into a painting, and for that reason alone can’t convey a clear-cut meaning.
In one of the photo collages, I even discovered a photo of myself. Also, one of Bazon Brock. In the painting Io et lui (2024), which is part of the same collage, you can see two figures: a busty, dominatrix-like Catwoman (Bazon Brock?) pulling a figure shown in profile at the edge of the picture (me?) by the hair, thereby bringing it into the picture’s space in the first place. So there’s no resemblance left of either of us; only Armin Boehm might know who he had in mind when he did the painting. The figures in his painting don’t have any fixed meaning, however, and anyone looking at the picture can follow their own associations or simply see an unusual scene in it—for example, be moved by how brightly the hand glows, pulling hair that’s almost as bright. I, at any rate, take the painting as a reminder to myself to look rather than to interpret.
