This work belongs to a series of paintings portraying great achievers of European intellectual history as comic memes. Fashion designers, kings and philosophers; the grotesque frog-like faces have an optimistic and yet ironic aura and were inspired by the internet culture. The series is also a reference to Martin Kippenberger's "Crucified Frog“, a work that provoked fierce controversy in the 1990s.

The series is an attempt to blatantly exaggerate the individuality in one way or another of the people portrayed and can be read as a rejection of excessive individualism. For this, the artist used only a few strokes of a fairly mundane comic to depict these hyper individualist personalities and yet the portraits are quite recognisable.

Is celebrity perhaps just a matter of attributes? Or ist a collective part in us portrayed, our own interchangeability by just using a different face instead of the real person?

From today's point of view everything that lies far back in history and seems monumental suddenly looks so human and mild in these pictures and makes one optimistic about the future.
"Mot à Mot" is inspired by the 1952 painting "Study for a Head" from Francis Bacon’s so-called “screaming pope” series; many of which are now in museum collections, "Study for a Head" draws on Diego Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X from circa 1650. Boehm collaged real money notes in the screaming mouth of the figure. A reference to the record for a painting from Bacon’s series of popes that was set in 2007 when it was sold at auction for USD 53 million.

Armin Boehm & Christoph Hefti