ART CITIES: N.York-Rita Ackermann

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.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

The opposing impulses of creation and destruction mark the touchstone Rita Ackermann’s practice, which continues to evolve and manifest itself in the shift from representation to abstraction. Her human forms simultaneously disappear and re-emerge. Rita Ackerman in her exhibition “Splits: Printing | Painting” presents her latest series of paintings and prints in simultaneous exhibitions spanning Hauser & Wirth Gallery’s two West Chelsea locations. At 542 West 22nd Street, the artist debuts a suite of new canvases expanding upon the techniques, themes and imagery she has explored over the course of her career since the early 1990s, while at 443 West 18th Street she unveils a series of complex large-scale silkscreens. Heralding a significant leap in her artistic practice, these prints represent a dramatic convergence of the technical processes of printmaking with Ackermann’s sustained exploration of form, movement and erasure. Titled “Splits”, Ackermann’s latest paintings mark a pinnacle in the artist’s ongoing concern with the creation of dynamic, moving images. In these canvases, forms cascade downward and upward, at times merging seamlessly into one another. To optimize the potential of such chance transformative processes, Ackermann conceptualized the canvas as divided into three screens, as she aptly calls them. This enabled her not only to guide the flow of line and paint, but also to forestall the coalescence of drawing and painting. No sketch prefigured the images that surfaced, except those carved into the recesses of her memory. Instead, Ackermann allowed an instinctive force to guide her hand as it moved across the fields before her. The fluctuation between the screens she populated with diaphanous lines and those carrying weightier, gestural strokes of color also conspired to infuse the paintings with an unexpected rhythm. In “Shut Eye” (2023), for example, two screens brimming with fragments of drawn shapes entice the eye to actively pull open the middle register and thereby show more of the painted forms within. This occurs even as the upper and lower screens seem to press inward, creating a dynamic tension between revelation and concealment. To enhance this impression, Ackermann occasionally used luminous yellow pigment to further instill in these paintings a sense of lightness and transparency. In the thick of bringing to canvas the metamorphic forms that would become the “Splits” Ackermann embarked on a new artistic endeavor, delving into the realm of printmaking. In the resultant seven large-scale silkscreens, which she produced in collaboration with master printer Keigo Takahashi, her concern with making manifest such images became imbued with a related objective: the transformation of paintings into prints, without recourse to the reproduction of a model. Though these silkscreens diverge from the compositional principles of the ‘Splits,’ like them they probe the boundaries of optical perception. To emphasize this, the exhibition includes two recent paintings. One of these, “The Rule of Nature” (2023)—which belongs to the “Splits” even bears the marks of Ackermann’s concern with combining monotype printing with painting. This visual feat owes just as much to the artist’s decision to approach the making of these silkscreens as though she were working on a canvas, as to any sleight of the hand enabled by their production. Ackermann began by layering drawings onto paper and then gradually superimposed gestural brush strokes, color stains and delicate droplets of pigment onto the underlying drawings, welcoming the occurrence of accidents through this process. This not only made the contrast between emerging and disappearing forms integral to many of her paintings visible, but also conveyed a sense of the centrifugal motion that frequently ensues in them. As such, those who contemplate these first silkscreens by the artist may well find themselves questioning whether the alleged split between printmaking and painting is, in fact, purely theoretical. Composed as a sequence of stacked-up semi-translucent frames, these canvases can also be seen as the visual equivalent of images imprinted on a film strip. Ackermann, in fact, draws parallels between the transformative essence of the images in the “Splits” and the dynamic permutations observed when montaged photographic images are projected in a cinema. In both mediums, meaning opens in the infinitesimal split between what the eye sees and the elusive. There, a unique motion also unfolds, one that oscillates between appearance and truth. In all these paintings, there is mystery, one that hints at the presence of the profound and unknowable. Through their enigmatic allure, the ‘Splits’ encourage the viewer to ponder the ineffable, reminding us that while transcendence eludes sight, its essence can nonetheless reveal itself.

Photo: Rita Ackermann, Mouchette’s Manners , 2023, Oil, acrylic and carpenter’s pencil on canvas, 233.7 x 218.4 cm / 92 x 86 in, 236.7 x 221.5 x 6.5 cm / 93 1/4 x 87 1/4 x 2 1/2 in framed), © Rita Ackermann, Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 542 West 22nd Street & Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 443 West 18th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 2/5-26/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/