Hans Alf Gallery is pleased to present Silent Muses, a new solo exhibition by Armin Boehm, opening on May 2, 2025, in the main gallery. With this new body of work, Boehm explores the tension between floral symbolism, female identity, and surreal narrative.
At the centre of the works are the floral still lifes and female portraits that oscillate between realism and abstraction. The still lifes, while appearing naturalistic, are in fact carefully composed and highly abstracted, drawing on the symbolic power of flowers. As still lifes, they speak of impermanence and mortality, yet they also affirm life. This duality - the paradox of death as an inseparable part of life - is central to Boehm’s intention: to remind us that the finiteness of time urges us to relish the present, to heighten our awareness of the beauty in the now.
Opposite the still lifes are the portraits of women - acquaintances, fleeting yet intimately observed - depicted in surreal constellations, often reading, their heads merging with floral forms. Reality and imagination begin to blur. Dreamlike sequences and animal figures - wolves, foxes, men? - emerge from shadows, suggesting psychological depth and symbolic readings, perhaps through a Jungian or Freudian lens. There is an undertone of ambiguity, even unease. Boehm’s painterly approach varies between thick, pastose layers, translucent washes, and finely drawn, minimal gestures - constantly shifting between clarity and dissolution.
These new paintings mark a shift away from the socially critical, urban-focused work that Boehm has exhibited in recent years. Instead of political observation, the gaze turns inward: towards the psychological, the personal, the poetic. The works retreat into a world of dream and reverie. They are in many ways a form of escapism - but one rich in nuance and cultural depth. Quotations from fin de siècle literature - Flaubert, Wilde, Huysmans - are subtly referenced, underlining a return to art for art’s sake, to a decadent, bohemian sensibility unfolding in private spaces.
This exhibition presents Boehm as an observer of interior worlds, a painter situated between dream and waking, between floral surface and feminine presence, between literary allusion and visual association - a quiet, poetic retreat into the fragility of everyday beauty, and a meditation on transience in the face of the inevitable.
Kilde:
Hans Alf Gallery
Hans Alf Gallery