Ackermann’s 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. His paintings deal with illusionary points of view, bringing together details from far away places to ones that are closer to home, seeing the city as a lens through which other places are represented. Entitled ‘Home, home again’ after a Pink Floyd song, this exhibition brought together a series of large-scale paintings, numerous drawings and floor- and wall-based sculptures that focus on London as their conceptual point of departure. For the first time, Ackermann presented a large-scale drawing that is 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 his show at White Cube Ackerman examined the relationship between tourism and terrorism – the spectre of international travel – as well as the way that cities are constantly in flux, in the case of London, looking towards the Olympic games in 2012 that will irrefutably change the layout of our existing city. Always site-specific, his work comments on the architecture of the space it inhabits whilst inviting the viewer to enter its proposed geographical space. Ackermann’s paintings fuse various perspectives in one image, from distant to close up or simultaneously from above and below creating an ungrounded, all-over terrain that recalls the energy of Italian Futurist paintings or the visual delirium and alienation that one experiences in new cities. The work is predicated on the roving eye of the artist, the travelling flâneur, which can be traced from Baudelaire to the ubiquitous contemporary tourist.