RITA ACKERMANN “MAMA 19’”
Rita Ackermann ‘Mama, Morty Smoking’, 2019. Oil, pigment, acrylic, china marker, and graphite on canvas. 223.5 x 198.1 cm © Rita Ackermann. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt
Beginning 20 February, Hauser & Wirth New York will present an exhibition “Mama 19′” 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 the 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.
Rita Ackermann “Mama 19’”
Date: 20th February – 11th April, 2020
Open: 10:00 – 18:00 (Closed on Sunday and Monday)
Place: Hauser & Wirth New York
Address: 548 West 22nd St New York, NY 10011
https://www.hauserwirth.com
Text: Editor
