ARMIN BOEHM
IM SPIEGEL VERLOREN

KÖNIG MUNICH | SILOS
AM BERGSON KUNSTKRAFTWERK 2, 81245 MUNICH

5 APRIL – 1 JUNE 2025

OPENING WITH ARTIST TALK
4 APRIL 2025 | 7:30 PM

KÖNIG BERGSON is pleased to present Armin Boehm’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, IM SPIEGEL VERLOREN (LOST IN THE MIRROR). In this body of work, Boehm constructs a fractured reality where the boundaries between fiction and history dissolve. Rather than mere repetition, history mutates, taking on new forms that challenge perception. Once-static images become charged with shifting meanings, their significance shaped by those who wield them. This continuous transformation echoes Richard Dawkins' concept of the meme: a vehicle of cultural transmission that mutates unpredictably over time. The term, which originates from a Greek word (see etymology), entered the German language through English, shaped by Dawkins to describe units of consciousness that, like Boehm’s imagery, undergo spontaneous mutations. While Dawkins contrasted memes with deliberate acts of creativity, Boehm’s paintings blur this distinction, exposing a reality where cultural symbols are at once manipulated and evolving of their own accord.

Armin Boehm, OIL, 2023

Figures materialize and dissolve in dense compositions: Trump, Putin, Peppa Pig, Pepe the Frog, Peggy from Sesame Street, conquistadors, hackers, neon-lit Moscow, King Kong. Symbols of power and entertainment collapse into one another. A political leader, bloodied, smirks through the grinning mask of a meme; an authority figure, multiplied, watches as the world rearranges itself beyond his grasp. Elsewhere, a puppet administers anesthesia, the soft glow of media pacification masking the unease beneath.

Boehm’s canvases unfold like an archive in motion, where past events flicker into the present. A cityscape, bathed in neon, holds the residue of the Cold War—capitalist billboards hang beside Soviet relics, nostalgia coexisting with propaganda. Hackers manipulate digital space, engineering new narratives. A DJ figure, draped in scenes from the artist’s own life, feeds banknotes into the mouth of another—money, war, and spectacle feeding into one another in an endless loop.

Meanwhile, gestures of absurd heroism play out in the margins. The Pink Panther reaches for Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, a slapstick rescue in the midst of collapse. But in another scene, a multi-headed figure, recalling Courbet’s "L’Origine du Monde," births war machines—one rolling forward on tank treads, another ablaze. Cycles of destruction, uninterrupted.

Like reflections in a mirror, Boehm’s paintings distort, repeat, and reassemble fragments of the world we think we recognize. What appears familiar unravels upon closer inspection, revealing a shifting interplay of power, spectacle, and manipulation. Figures, events, and ideologies resurface in new forms, each time refracted through a different lens—history mutating as it is retold. The mirror offers no stable image, only a continuous process of reinterpretation. IM SPIEGEL VERLOREN does not simply depict this shifting reality—it becomes a part of it. Like the images it interrogates, the exhibition resists fixed meaning, reflecting the world back at us in fragments, distorted yet uncannily recognizable.