Since the 1990s, the artist Franz Ackermann has been traveling the world feeding the research for his work. While traveling, he collects postcards, bags, newspapers, maps, and posters that are references for his works, bringing aspects of collage and design to painting. With a studio in Berlin, his paintings combine elements from many sources, such as architecture, design, and advertising, taken from megalopolises like Singapore, Hong Kong, and New York. In the early 2000s, Ackermann began visiting Brazil regularly, especially the city of São Paulo, where he exhibited several times. In the painting Empty Flagposts/ME, two masts without flags are represented on a background that alternates fields of flat colors, geometric patterns, and expressive brushstrokes, generating multiple perspectives in a fragmented space. Some elements refer to shutters, breeze blocks, windows, towers and bridges, while the large yellow and pink areas in the center of the painting lead the eye to the background, building a color, gesture and shape dynamic that intensifies at the edges. The empty flagsposts suggest a kind of “nowhere,” with no history or identity, as opposed to the subjective “me” indicated in the title, yet populated with so many colors, shapes, and references. Ackermann’s painting works, in this way, as a “mental map” (an expression that gives the title to many of his works), moving between representation, figuration, and abstraction, between the city and the self, in a context of accelerated globalization and urbanization.

— Leandro Muniz, assistent curator, MASP, 2022

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