Artist Research Artist 4: Franz Ackermann The Secret Tunnel 1999, Oil on Canvas 260 x 200cm Ackermann’s cityscape is information overload: a seething metropolis striated in Technicolor glory. Grey modernist architecture looms at an unnatural angle, engulfed in retro-style smog, while an inverted stairway to heaven descends into the open earth below. Ackermann paints his underworld as a spacey utopia: fiery blobs of magma swell with hypnotic seduction, revealing a virgin landscape at their core. The Secret Tunnel is not a paradise, but an upper and middle earth equally and oppositely attractive. Evasion XVI (the disaster) - 1998 Acrylic on cotton red, full on – 2005. Oil on canvas 125 x 155 cm. How this artist's work relates to mine is that he did abstracts of buildings using bold colours and other images, making a collage. I also would like to do something like this.