Rita Ackermann

Mama ‘21

8 October – 23 December 2021

Monaco

Ackermann’s approach of layering and visible complexity makes the works ultimately unknowable, eluding any efforts to be read as stories.

Explore the exhibition

In the artist’s first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Monaco, Hungarian-born, New York-based Rita Ackermann presents a brand-new body of work from her Mama series which began in 2019. The exhibition consists of paintings on canvas which reveal her persisting interrogation of line, colour and form. In Ackermann’s new suite of Mama paintings, repeated imagery is often combined with vivid swathes of colour, giving her work an enigmatic visual component that oscillates between abstraction and figuration.

Works in the exhibition including ‘Mama, Monte Carlo’ (2021) and ‘Mama, How can you see someone’s soul?’ (2021) depict figures and motifs that rise to the surface of the canvas, only to dissolve and reappear elsewhere again. Lying beneath layers of oil paint are drawings in china marker or ink that are left obscured. Thick layers of impasto and oil are also vigorously applied and scraped in such works, culminating in a layering effect that is often created by chance instances and combinations of accidental gestures.

Some drawn forms are disrupted by bursts of colour or are incessantly scraped away with finger marks until they’re gone, exemplified in works such as ‘Mama, Yves’s Mask’ (2021) or ‘Mama, the Knight of the Cave’ (2021). The weight of the paint’s application combined with the additive and subtractive process of colour and figurative line, evoke a nuanced interior realm.

The radical indeterminacy of the works is what makes them living, breathing entities separate from the artist’s hand.Ackermann says of her works:

‘As soon as an image becomes clear or readable, in the very same moment it loses its own meaning in another form. The painting keeps everything well hidden, cloaked in great secrecy. The painting contains of multitude of transparent line figures and forms. This multitude should evoke simplicity and sincerity rather than any sort of sophistication. The picture must fall a thousand times but each time it picks itself up again to fulfill its mission to serve the unknowable, unnamable, anew. When a painting begins it must constantly begin anew, as though there was never a predecessor. Each painting has to start from the lowest level to build itself up no matter what level its predecessor accomplished. Sophistication is unnecessary. Painting doesn’t require complicated thinking, but sincerity.’

On view in Monaco

‘Rita Ackermann. Mama ‘21’ is open at Hauser & Wirth Monaco, Tue – Sat, 10 am – 6 pm. Please visit our location page for further information.

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About the Artist

Rita Ackermann

Rita Ackermann (b. 1968, Budapest, Hungary) immigrated 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.

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