Mama ’19
February 20 - April 11, 2020
New York, 22nd Street
As a preventive measure and based on the guidance of health officials, our galleries in New York are closed until further notice. Beginning 20 February, Hauser & Wirth will present the latest body of work by Hungarian born, New York-based artist Rita Ackermann: a suite of new paintings in which figures and motifs rise to the surface of canvases, only to dissolve and reappear elsewhere again. In such works as ‘Mama Painting for Mars’ (2019), repeated figurative imagery and expanses of intense color combine in complex visual currents. In other works, Ackermann’s distinctive approach to layering of drawings, yields a framework for a maelstrom of vibrant pigments and textures that seem to advance toward the viewer with velocity. Like Ackermann’s Chalkboard Paintings (2015), the works on view in ‘Mama ’19’ are built through an additive and subtractive process. Here, her palette and gestural vocabulary has expanded to evoke a vibrant interior realm through the application of paint. Thick layers of impasto and oil stick are vigorously and repeatedly applied and scraped in such works as ‘Mama, Morty Smoking’ (2019), with both the paintbrush and the artist’s bare hands working to shape a site of ancestry and conception. However, Ackermann’s work rejects efforts to read as stories. An inheritor of the gestural abstractions of such American masters as Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly, her images are the product of automatic gestures, a subconscious unfolding on the canvas. Her’s is a study of relationships – between figuration and abstraction, between personal and collective experience within. As an extension of the exhibition, ‘Rita Ackermann, Mama ’19’ is accompanied by a publication featuring essays by Scott Griffin and Harmony Korine.
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Thu Feb 20, 2020, 6 pm – 12 am
Please join us for the opening reception of ‘Rita Ackermann. Mama '19,’ an exhibition of new paintings by Hungarian born, New York-based artist Rita Ackermann. Ackermann’s Mama series deploy figurative line drawings only to be obscured by expanses of color alike. Evoking the foundations of ancestry, Ackermann’s figures and motifs rise to the surface only to dissolve and reappear elsewhere again. Her study is one of relationships, between both figuration and abstraction and to the enigmatic balance of personal and collective narratives within.
The opposing impulses of creation and destruction mark the touchstone of the Hungarian-born, New York-based artist Rita Ackermann’s practice, which continues to evolve and manifest itself in the shift from representation to abstraction.
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