Rita Ackermann
Splits
2 May – 26 July 2024
New York, 22nd Street
On 2 May, Hauser & Wirth will present Rita Ackermann’s latest series of paintings and prints in simultaneous exhibitions spanning the gallery’s two West Chelsea locations. At 542 West 22nd Street, the artist will debut 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 will unveil 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.
2+2=5
2024
Dr. Pamela Kort on Rita Ackermann’s exhibitions:
Splits
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.
Reversed Angles
2023
Mouchette’s Manners
2023
Oil, acrylic and carpenter’s pencil on canvas
233.7 x 218.4 cm / 92 x 86 in
2 May – 26 July 2024
Rita Ackermann. Splits: Printing | Painting
On view at New York, 18th Street
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.
Related Content
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.
Current Exhibitions
1 / 12