Franz Ackermann makes vibrant paintings and installations centred on themes of travel, tourism, globalisation and urbanism. 'Mental Maps', his first major series, were produced during a stay in Hong Kong. Combining the factual precision of traditional street maps with his own interpretation of the local environment, these small watercolours documented the artist’s perception of the great cities of Asia, South America and Australia. Ackermann has since created large-scale dynamic installations that are built up from individual components comprising paintings, drawings, photographs, wall drawings and sculptural, billboard-like constructions. His work frequently deals with the double side of tourism – the glamour, speed and consumption of international travel but also the detritus, architectural scarring and garbage that it leaves behind, and his installations often take on the appearance of strange advertisements for a global tourism industry run amok. The places he depicts have a generic quality, and yet they look strangely familiar: non-places where the traveller’s desire replaces the local culture. His most recent White Cube exhibition, ‘Home, home again' (2006) brought together a series of large-scale paintings, drawings and sculptures that focus on London as their point of departure. Ackermann presented a large-scale drawing that provides a metaphorical link between his ongoing ‘Mental Map’ series – watercolours made while on the move in hotels around the world – and his paintings, constructed from memory in the studio. In recent work, including the installations Terminal (2008) and Gateway – Getaway (2009), Ackermann uses a combination of photography, drawing, painting and sculpture to create large-scale environments of unstable references, as if the distance between places and the differences between cultures had condensed into a single, vertiginous space. Franz Ackermann was born in 1963 in Neumarkt St Veit, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin and Karlsruhe, Germany. He has exhibited extensively including solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany (2014); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2013); Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires (2012); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2009); Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland (2008); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2005); Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, Germany (2004); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2002); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2002); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2000); and Portikus Frankfurt am Main, Germany (1997). Selected group exhibitions include Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2018); Central Academy of Fine Arts Art Museum, Beijing (2017); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2016); 2nd Montevideo Biennial (2014), Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2009); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2008); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005); 25th Bienal de São Paulo (2002); and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2001).