In the Chemical Alphabet paintings, Rita Ackermann takes on a new source of vocabulary: letters from a Semitic alphabet. The structure of each symbol serves as an anchor for each composition.
The configuration of the letter, painted in acrylic green chalkboard paint on a canvas primed by multiple silkscreen prints, allows the surface to be built through Ackermann’s chalkboard method: layers of pastel and chalk drawings are erased, washed away, and redrawn until multiple states of the painting coexist on the canvas.
Here, the picture advances through accumulation and erasure. At the center of this constructive destruction, the letter remains, its meaning shifting with the evolving image around it.
What stays visible is not the frozen image but the chronicle of its becoming.
Not as easy as 1, 2, 3...
If you define something, what something is, it is no longer that something.
My preference is not to talk about or put words to my work.
It either works for you or doesn’t work for you and me explaining it isn’t going to make it work for you.
When you see a drawing in orange, purple and green chalk scribbled up on a greenboard… there is some levity in those scribbles. Unexplainable doesn’t mean inaccessible.
It might just mean inexplicable.
A good painting has the touch.
It also has rhythm which continues through a series into a melody.
There is little explanation for these paintings besides chemistry. You have chemistry with them or you don’t.
They contain substances.
Their language is formed from the combinations of the unfamiliar elements with the familiar, evolving into something different, something that I haven’t seen before.
The unfamiliar component is the alphabet. The familiar parts are my own tried methods .
Anchored by a letter of the alphabet, the picture stands in the epicenter of methodical deconstruction.
Whatever the cyclone of chance twists and wipes off the surface, it disappears.
The remains stay engraved.
Even if it is possible to break down the making of the Aleph-Bet paintings into 1,2,3, they ultimately resist definition and make themselves
— Rita Ackermann
Installation Views
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About the Artist
Rita Ackermann
Rita Ackermann (b. 1968, Budapest, Hungary) moved from Hungary to New York in 1992, where a formative body of work positioned her within the cultural zeitgeist of the city. At the outset of her early career, a breakthrough series of paintings—composed of bold contour lines and semi-transparent bodies—anticipated aesthetic and technological shifts that have proven remarkably timeless.
Though Ackermann’s works may be recursive, they are anchored by improvisation, disruption, and formal negation—the protein of her aesthetic. These elements were shaped in part by her engagement with cinema, particularly the films of Jean-Luc Godard and the theories of Paul Virilio, who viewed perception as structured by montage and fragmentation.
Ackermann’s paintings continue to bear the imprint of visual phenomena—not only in their subject, but in their structure. Images operate cryptically, fractured and charged with interior volatility. Their continual appearance and disappearance suggest that suspension, rather than development, is central to her method. The upshot has been a sustained visual practice that subtly confronts the tensions of the present.
Current Exhibitions
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