About Rita Ackermann
Rita Ackermann was born in 1968 in Budapest, Hungary. After her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest (1989 – 1992) she moved to New York City where she studied at The New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture (1992 – 1993). In 2009 she spent several months in Marfa, Texas at the Chinati Foundation’s artist-in-residence programme, where she focused on the abstract conceptual elements of her work.
Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows internationally including ‘KLINE RAPE’, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2016 – 2017); ‘The Aesthetic of Disappearance’ at Malmö Konsthalle, Malmo, (2016); ‘Chalkboard Paintings’ at Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2015); ‘MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE – HAIR WASH’ at Sammlung Friedrichshof, Zurndorf, and Sammlung Friedrichshof Stadtraum, Vienna (2014); ‘Negative Muscle’, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2013); ‘Fire by Days’, Hauser & Wirth, London (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2012); ‘Bakos’, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2011); and ‘Rita Ackermann and Harmony Korine: ShadowFux’, Swiss Institute, New York (2010).
What inspires her work?
Music and dance are particularly important to Rita Ackermann; she believes that the process of painting involves a pattern of unconscious movements that we can consider to be a dance.
She listens to a range of music from Niccolò Paganini to Philip Glass to Gang Gang Dance. Ackermann names Maya Deren, the dancer and experimental film maker, as her ‘eternal icon’.Another film maker referenced by Ackermann is Werner Hezog and in particular his 2010 ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ about the Chauvet Cave in southern France, which contains the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. Whilst at art school Ackermann looked at the Viennese Actionists, a radical and explicit form of performance art that developed in the Austrian capital during the 1960s, and Cobra, a group of Expressionist painters formed in Paris in 1948 by Netherlandish and Scandinavian artists.
What does her exhibition look like?
‘Turning Air Blue’ extends through two galleries and doubles as an organic continuation of Somerset’s rural setting. The exhibition starts in the Rhoades gallery, which features a body of work titled The Coronation and Massacre of Love. The paintings here are large-scale compositions on canvas primed with chalkboard paint, on which washes of white chalk and green and blue pigments have been applied. These Abstract Expressionist-like works are reminiscent of actual chalkboards in a classroom, covered with unintentional erasures and marks, yet they have been conceptually executed by multiple deletions of figurative drawings and landscapes. By way of these gestures, the revenant outline of the erased drawings often emerges into the foreground.
The final picture is a record of these movements.
The exhibition continues into the Bourgeois gallery, which comprises two bodies of work: Turning Air Blue and Nudes. The paintings titled Turning Air Blue are large-scale pigment paintings on canvas where translucent figures suggest a feminine shape. These works derive from the Fire by Days series – paintings inspired by accident being the true enemy of intention – which formed Ackermann’s introductory exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, London, in 2012. The palette of these new works is rendered by flesh tones shading into blue. The large paintings have an airy lightness about them, contrasting with the much smaller Nudes. While these smaller framed oils bear a similar pigmentation, they are painted more thickly to evoke the physicality of the female body.
What are her main themes?
The human figure, both present and absent, figurative and abstract, nude or thinly clad, alluding to the feminine, features often in Ackermann’s work. The nude figure is a tradition in Western art and expresses human energy and life as well as basic or complex emotions such as pathos. Ackermann’s nudes move between figuration and abstraction and put ‘us in touch with what remains ungovernable in the body’. The artist states: ‘My work always starts out form the body or ends up with the body and body movements. The work I make is in close discourse with the body – with my body – even if it has no direct reference to it. I paint the body from within my head’. She refutes feminist readings of her work, and recalls that raised under Communism she did not grow up to differentiate on the basis of gender as women and men were perceived in this context as equal human resources.
The series of work titled Turning Air Blue are a direct progression of Fire by Days, a major series Ackermann initiated in 2010, which heralded a merger of the non-representational and the figurative in her art. ‘Fire by Days’ was inspired by the appearance of a figure in an accidental spillage of paint. Ackermann is interested in this Rorschach-like experience of seeing something recognisable in the accidental.
Her chalkboard paintings touch on themes of creativity, mobility, disappearance and the limits of representation. ‘Chalk isn’t meant to last and has no importance as a material. Its sole purpose is to be erased after it has done the work. ’Ackermann has previously spoken about having to destroy everything first [...] in order to be able to create’ and here in these paintings absence creates presence, ‘Being there by being missed’. This effacing of her own work is a concept first visited in a much earlier series of drawings from the 1990s, where ballpoint pen was layered on top of painted images, creating a transparent veil, whereby the original images disappeared and reappeared, invoking a sense of mobility within the works.
SOURCE: https://i2.cmsfiles.com/hws/2017/12/TeachersNotes_Rita_Ackermann_corrected-888bab.pdf
QUOTE BY RITA ACKERMAN
When you have a dream, you don't even want to tell yourself straight out that this is what you want. You try to hide it. I never told myself I wanted to be a tennis player. But being an artist, yes, this is what I wanted since I first sat down to draw or paint. I knew that . . . I had that vision.
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
DREAM OUT LOUD!