ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Rita Ackermann

Rita Ackermann’s compositions occupy a space between the figurative and the abstract, where human forms simultaneously disappear and re-emerge. In a series titled “Chalkboard Paintings”, large-scale compositions on canvas were primed with chalkboard paint, on which washes of white chalk and green and blue pigments were applied. These Abstract Expressionist-like works are reminiscent of actual chalkboards in a classroom, covered with unintentional erasures and marks, yet they have been conceptually executed by multiple deletions of figurative drawings and landscapes.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

Composed primarily of large-scale oil paintings that intuitively recast the interplay of line, color and form, Rita Ackermann’s solo exhibition “Vertical Vanish” makes a game of repeated gestures, figures and motifs. Pre-drawn scenes obscurely emerge from the background, only to disappear into impasto fields of imbricated color. Through a series of gestural interventions guided by the artist’s hand – an admixture of drawing, painting and erasure – oil paints, China markers and acrylics are heavily worked onto surfaces of canvas or raw linen. The lines constituting Ackermann’s figures are lost to near total abstraction; thickly applied washes of paint are scraped away at, giving rise to revelatory compositions. In addition to the larger works, a selection of small, overpainted monotype prints on paper (all dating from 2022) will also be on view. These small paintings occupy a middle distance between the mindful reworking of available materials at hand and the unveiling of hidden motifs. In works such as “Vertical Vanis”’ (2022), the painting from which the exhibition’s name derives, underlying figures are overlaid with vivid detonations of color. The materialized afterimage of these colored saturations acts like a veil which seems to environ the viewer while falling just shy of articulating any precise narrative. The measured intensity by which pigments are worked over communicates the purposeful energy of a spatial calligraphy. Relative to the three erased figures at the foreground of the canvas, the ascending vertical spiral becomes the centerpiece of the painting, preserving the harmony of opposing rhythms. The kind of dynamism Ackermann’s paintings communicate at least partially derives from the sense of urgency that goes into making them. Working on a particular picture may very well involve entering into the uncertain arena of various rescue operations: unforeseeable problems or intended accidents that the artist has to work around or assimilate. As they move toward their final composition, Ackermann’s paintings reflect the perpetual motion of these various survival missions. In this, her layered surfaces are haloed with the aura of many residual, activating gestures.

Rita Ackermann studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1989 to 1992, then at the Studio School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture in New York, where she found the teaching too conservative. Feeling closer to pop culture than to movements endorsed by the elites of the art world, she experimented in different fields, focusing equally on drawing, collage and performance. Uninterested in established judgements and academism, she takes her inspiration from urban culture, street art and the world of the night. Strongly influenced by the underground music scene, her production has often benefited from collaborative projects with cult figures on the punk and no wave scene, such as Sonic Youth (Sensational Fix, 2008). Thus, the bubbling vitality of New York in the 1980s resurfaces in her visual chronicles fuelled by fantasized images of a living, demonic reality that is also ordinary and blunt. Ackermann reinterprets the image of women and focuses on the darkest aspects of adolescent life.

Photo: Rita Ackermann, Mama, Május, 2019, Oil, acrylic, pigment, pastel, and china marker on canvas, 187.8 x 193.2 x 4 cm / 73 7/8 x 76 1/8 x 1 5/8 in, © Rita Ackermann, Photo: Andreas Zimmermann, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles CA, USA, Duration: 2/2-30/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/