Rita Ackermann: Mama '19
The latest body of work features a suite of new paintings in which figures and motifs rise to the surface of canvases, only to dissolve and reappear elsewhere again.
Installation view, Rita Ackermann, 'Mama '19', 2020. Photo: Thomas Barratt
Rita Ackermann, 'Mama, Midsummer Night's Dream', 2019 (Detail) © Rita Ackermann
Furthering her distinctive approach to layering of drawings, 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 with both the paintbrush and the artist’s bare hands working to shape a site of ancestry and conception.
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.
The exhibition coincides with the release of a new publication of the same title via Hauser & Wirth Publishers with contributions by Scott Griffin, Harmony Korine and the artist herself.
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‘Rita Ackermann, Mama ‘19’, is on view at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street 20 February- 11 April 2020.
