Rita Ackermann

Ackermann’s Doubles (2024 – 2025) bespeak things that bedevil one another: a present the artist can never be at one with; a past that disallows any full disencumbering—images so well-known that they might be better forgotten. What force drives such image-making, if not a desire to capture the nuances of an ever-shifting reality dominated by a sense of absences and displacements? In these new works, shapes invert, colors reverse, images can be read as positives or negatives. In some of them, contour lines entrance, forming figures both elastic and weightless, always on the verge of vanishing. In others, pigment reduces bodies to a few restless, contorted shapes. Everything about these Doubles not only turns the tables on their beholders, but also subverts established ways of interpreting works of art. Even their title misleads, for these Doubles have as little to do with mirrors as with alter egos. Instead, these images of images fluctuate between remaining a nascent specter and the moment when that mental projection gains substance, doubling into a recognizable thing, as in cinema.

The artist’s concern with such visual phenomena is not merely conceptual. Its origins reach back to impulses that began to structure her life, when she relocated from Budapest to New York City. From then on, she began to exist in a median state, defined by a double set of experiences: the one, anchored in a soft-Communist upbringing; the other, a coming of age as an artist in the dream factory of the Big Apple, where she chose to remain. The dialectic between those two beginning points also left a deep mark on her first body of work (1993-1995): the adolescent girls who would become the springboard for much that followed, for example, ‘Doubles 8’ (2025). Its flattened, almost transhuman forms appear as though enlargements on a screen that slides in and out of view. Overlapping and instable, like their predecessors these girls are nothing if not clones.