About ‘Rita Ackermann. The Chemical Alphabet’
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.

‘About Dan Colen. Disney Paintings’
The exhibition brings together a selection of never before exhibited paintings (2011 - 2025), spanning the breadth of Colen’s twenty-year engagement with the series. Taking frames from iconic Disney films as their points of departure, the works position background as primary subject, inverting the expectations and utility of figurative painting while navigating the liminal space between narrative, realism, and abstraction. Here, the landscape itself emerges as the central character.

By excluding the heroes of fairy tales and foregrounding the scenic backgrounds, the works enact an inversion in which non-place emerges as protagonist. This gesture suggests that the acceleration of accessibility ultimately destabilizes the image itself, shifting away from corporate identity toward a form of atmospheric opacity.

Nature returns as a site of wonder through the concept of utopia as both “no place” and an unattainable ideal. This inquiry into idealism extends beyond the paintings through Sky High Farm, a non profit organization founded by Dan Colen in 2012 a few miles from The Maria Leuff Foundation, where regenerative agriculture, farming, and community-driven food sovereignty converge as both social and ecological practice.

About Rita Ackermann
Born in Budapest in 1968, Ackermann studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts before moving to New York in 1992 to attend the New York Studio School. Immersing herself in the city’s collaborative cultural landscape, her work, at once graphic, bodily and charged with the psychic textures of youth culture, quickly became associated with New York’s raw artistic scene.

Over the past three decades, Ackermann’s conceptual and recursive approach has allowed her work to move fluidly between figuration and abstraction. Drawing, painting, printmaking, music, and video coexist within her expanded practice, while improvisation, disruption, and formal negation drive images to disappear and re-emerge as unstable traces. Shaped in part by her engagement with cinema, her work treats sound as image and image as vibration, echoing Godard’s proposition that one must sometimes ‘listen to the image and look at the sound.’

About Dan Colen
Dan Colen was born in New Jersey in 1979 and lives and works in New York. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Royal Academy of Arts, London; MoMA PS1, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich; the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo; and the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, Denmark.