Fabrice Marcolini is pleased to announce Armin Böehm’s first Artcore exhibition.

Magic Hour features a series of five large-scale landscape paintings which are atmospheric portraits of a time and place charged with tension and foreboding. The scenes seem to penetrate the darkness using intensified starlight and electric street lamps, depicting a nightscape that reaches beyond what the naked eye can see.

“Magic Hour” is a term often used in filmmaking to describe the brief time when the sun dips below the horizon producing a soft, diffused glow. Böehm skillfully manages to capture this effect through painting giving his scenes a dreamlike, magical quality which is undeniably cinematic, reminiscent of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Kubrick’s The Shining.

The paintings in Magic Hour are visions of tranquility interrupted by traces of violence; smashed tree trunks, abandoned cars, and destroyed bridges allude to a sinister unseen event. Böehm’s body of work includes controversial subject matter such as prison yards, terrorist camps, and nuclear weapon facilities. He turns the familiar on its side creating his own subversive interpretation.

The artist does not attempt to shed a background or narrative onto his works allowing the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks. Like in a surreal horror film, suspense is created by allowing the viewer to interpret their own scenarios. What you don’t see is just as important as what you do see.

Armin Böehm was born in 1972 in Aachen, Germany and lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Art Academy in Munster, and achieved his masters of fine arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf. Armin Böehm was featured amongst Thomas Zipp, Candice Breitz, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Julius Popp in Made in Germany, a survey of the best young contemporary art from Germany.