Over the last twenty years, Franz Ackermann has created a body of work that draws on his personal experience of travel and of his encounter with architecture and the urban space. His mental maps use a mixture of sensations and memories of the global cities he has explored. They then feed into his installations and large, vivid paintings where architectural constructions and organic rhythms meet.

With Our Houses, Ackermann tackles the realm of the intimate. The house, both a physical and mental object, a metaphor for the individual and her/his aspirations and relationship with the world, contends with a hallucinatory vision of today’s urban realities. Behind the exuberance of the works, this encounter between the private and the global subtly questions the wariness of our European societies, where the sense of hospitality and sharing is vanishing.