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African Diamond, 2006.

Franz Ackermann’s work explores issues of travel and tourism, contrasting subjective experience with broader issues of globalization, mobility, and commerce. He travels to select locations to render time and geographic space in wall-scale paintings and mixed-media constructions. African Diamond, like many of his works, eradicates the formal boundaries between sculpture, painting, and advertising by translating each medium’s visual vocabulary into his own distinct patois. The form of this collaged sculpture references that of a diamond, while the imagery that covers it references African maps and topographies as well as the stones themselves. A valuable commodity that has been not only the locus of national strife, but also the cause of centuries of international involvement in African affairs, the diamond is an entryway into thinking about the multifaceted history of that continent.

(Las tres piezas, en el MOCA's First Thirty Years, Los Angeles, 2010)