Leo Gallery | Shanghai
Armin Boehm: The Sonder Montage
Leo Gallery is honored to present The Sonder Montage, a solo exhibition by German artist Armin Boehm. Spanning sixteen years of artistic exploration from 2009 to 2025—from early oil paintings on board such as Reuz to recent large-scale fabric collages like Le Spectre de la Rose and Liquidity Dreams—the exhibition traces Boehm’s ongoing investigation into mixed-media painting, constructing a narrative field where the individual and the collective, the private and the public, the real and the virtual converge.
“We live in an uncomfortable age.”
— Armin Boehm
The term Sonder, coined by American writer, artist John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, describes a sudden moment of realization: that every stranger passing by lives a life as vivid and intricate as one’s own. Armin Boehm serves as the visual director of this “montage of multitudes.” His canvases function as stages where politicians, revelers, cyborgs, flowers, and animals coexist—each granted equal narrative weight. There is no central figure, and no mere background.
The painting Many Rooms but the Doors Look the Same encapsulates this concept. Within it, multiple doors—identical in appearance yet leading to divergent fates—open onto three women, each absorbed in her own posture, emotion, and interior world. The composition forms a miniature parallel universe, allowing us to glimpse simultaneous fragments of life. These spaces are distinct yet coexist within the same pictorial plane, revealing the essence of contemporary experience—behind countless similar doors lie countless real, surging worlds.
Boehm’s methodology itself operates as a kind of montage. Through the juxtaposition and collage of oil paint and industrial fabrics—akin to cinematic “jump cuts”and“dissolves”—he generates visual friction and semantic resonance. In Füchse träumen und Katzen fliegen (Foxes Dream, Cats Take Flight), surreal creatures intrude upon the order of reality, becoming voices of the “Other” that interrupt continuity, much like those chance encounters that unexpectedly alter the trajectory of life.
The Sonder Montage invites viewers into a labyrinth of countless“private rooms”, a mental architecture where grand political narratives and delicate personal emotions are treated with equal gravity. Here, tenderness coexists with cruelty, absurdity with truth. The exhibition calls for a quiet reversal of perspective— to experience a Sonder-like awakening: realizing that we are both the protagonists of our own stories and fleeting presences in the stories of others.
