Rita Ackermann

Red Dots

Viewing location: New York

2020
Oil, acrylic and pigment on linen
177.8 x 127 cm / 70 x 50 in
180.3 x 130.2 x 5.7 cm / 71 x 51 1/4 x 2 1/4 in (framed)

Rita Ackermann’s ‘Red Dots’ (2020) encapsulates the artist’s inimitable approach to painting and her ability to instinctively conjure complex visual compositions. Born in Budapest and based in New York, Ackermann attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Hungary before emigrating to the United States in the early 1990s. Graceful and gestural at once, her vivid works oscillate between figuration and abstraction, as forms appear and disappear on the canvas. Similar to the automatic drawings of the Dadaists, Ackermann often starts by freely drawing onto raw canvas, only to later obscure the delicate lines with layers of acrylic and oil paint.

In ‘Red Dots,’ two figures sitting next to each other seem to emerge from a maelstrom of color, their bodies blurring into swathes of cerulean, teal, and chartreuse, their black contours developing a life of their own. Green and red dots are scattered over the pair, further obscuring the figures into abstraction. The bright vermillion of the dots and overlaying lines stand in contrast to the otherwise blue and green color palette, creating an almost palpable vibrancy. Executed alongside Ackermann’s ‘Mama’ series, recently shown at Hauser & Wirth’s spaces in Monaco, Zurich, and New York, ‘Red Dots’ exemplifies the artist’s extraordinary oeuvre and her continuous interrogation of line, color, and form.

About the artist

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.

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