Rita Ackermann

Mama ‘21

8 October – 23 December 2021

Monaco

Ackermann’s approach of layering and visible complexity makes the works ultimately unknowable, eluding any efforts to be read as stories.

Explore the exhibition

In the artist’s first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Monaco, Hungarian-born, New York-based Rita Ackermann presents a brand-new body of work from her Mama series which began in 2019. The exhibition consists of paintings on canvas which reveal her persisting interrogation of line, colour and form. In Ackermann’s new suite of Mama paintings, repeated imagery is often combined with vivid swathes of colour, giving her work an enigmatic visual component that oscillates between abstraction and figuration.

Mama, Monte Carlo

2021

Mama, How can you see someone’s Soul?

2021

Mama, Under the Brutal Hand of a Child

2021

Works in the exhibition including ‘Mama, Monte Carlo’ (2021) and ‘Mama, How can you see someone’s soul?’ (2021) depict figures and motifs that rise to the surface of the canvas, only to dissolve and reappear elsewhere again. Lying beneath layers of oil paint are drawings in china marker or ink that are left obscured. Thick layers of impasto and oil are also vigorously applied and scraped in such works, culminating in a layering effect that is often created by chance instances and combinations of accidental gestures.

Mama, Yves’s Mask

2021

Mama, the Knight of the Cave

2021

Mama, Masked and Anonymous

2021

Some drawn forms are disrupted by bursts of colour or are incessantly scraped away with finger marks until they’re gone, exemplified in works such as ‘Mama, Yves’s Mask’ (2021) or ‘Mama, the Knight of the Cave’ (2021). The weight of the paint’s application combined with the additive and subtractive process of colour and figurative line, evoke a nuanced interior realm.

The radical indeterminacy of the works is what makes them living, breathing entities separate from the artist’s hand.Ackermann says of her works:

‘As soon as an image becomes clear or readable, in the very same moment it loses its own meaning in another form. The painting keeps everything well hidden, cloaked in great secrecy. The painting contains of multitude of transparent line figures and forms. This multitude should evoke simplicity and sincerity rather than any sort of sophistication. The picture must fall a thousand times but each time it picks itself up again to fulfill its mission to serve the unknowable, unnamable, anew. When a painting begins it must constantly begin anew, as though there was never a predecessor. Each painting has to start from the lowest level to build itself up no matter what level its predecessor accomplished. Sophistication is unnecessary. Painting doesn’t require complicated thinking, but sincerity.’

Mama, Deer Hunter

2021

Mama, In the Haze of Feeble Sun

2021

Mama, Rapture

2021

On view in Monaco

‘Rita Ackermann. Mama ‘21’ is open at Hauser & Wirth Monaco, Tue – Sat, 10 am – 6 pm. Please visit our location page for further information.

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About the Artist

Rita Ackermann

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.

Ackermann’s compositions occupy a space between the figurative and the abstract, where human forms simultaneously disappear and re-emerge. In a series titled Chalkboard Paintings, large-scale compositions on canvas were primed with chalkboard paint, on which washes of white chalk and green and blue pigments were 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.

Learn more about this artist