Rita Ackermann: Splits at Hauser & Wirth

Rita Ackermann, 2+2=5, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 92 x 84 inches
 

Rita Ackermann: Splits
Hauser & Wirth
542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY
May 2–July 26, 2024

First showing up on the scene in the 90,s, fresh from crumbling central Europe, Hungary specifically, which in some way may have lent the teeming proto-Punk environment of the East Village rife for plumbing by a vivacious Rita Ackermann. Firstly, her early work fit right in. The confluence of prepubescent waifs, over off-hand brushy grounds that owed something to the male dominated era of the Abstract Expressionists, solidified like an insignia both encapsulated the mood and look of the time and became a trademark. Deployed as outline drawings of naifs, in pencil and paint, who come across as surrogates of the artist herself–though one work, Mouchette’s Manners, 2023 lays homage to one of Robert Bresson’s masterpieces that featured a long-suffering girl child, portrayed by Nadine Nortier–lounge pose across the expanse of the canvas. The only other painter working in, and pursuing, this niche at the time was Sue Williams. The avant-gardist hipster ethos that runs freely in Ackermann’s practice had reciprocity with Kids, Harmony Korine and Sonic Youth, representing the rougher and more robust side of the 90s; Nirvana would fall into this canon as well.

Rita Ackermann, Mouchette’s Manners, 2023, oil, acrylic and carpenters pen on canvas, 92 x 86 inches

A decade ago her paintings displayed a visual kinship with the work of Gary Simmons, who himself exploited the early techniques of Cy Twombly, by resembling classroom blackboards that a talented tween went to work on. That is all gone now.

Ackermann has said that she has been looking at the same five artists throughout her career. One look at her new work can give one a pretty good guess at who those five are. The eight paintings presented here, all consistently a rectangle that pushes and squeezes a seven foot square to an optimal viewing plane, and all created last year with the exception of 2+2=5, representing this year, shown here under the collective title Splits. The game afoot in the overall compositions are obliquely reminiscent of Georg Baselitz’s early pre-upside down work that exploited fractured images. There is also a heavy nod to de Kooning in the passages of impasto.
 

Rita Ackermann, Noisy Feet, 2023, oil and carpenters pen on canvas, 92 x 84 inches

The exhibition, with the majority of the works hung in a barrage along the main confronting wall of the gallery instill the fusillade of energy one gets from perusing the panels of a well composed comic. There is also the sense of peeking through the shutters, enhanced by the sequential installation, and getting snatches and glimmers of the action that lies beyond. This effect is compounded in Shutters, 2023 with the erratically-sized milky bands spanning and overlaying the bottom third of the canvas. The flourish here recalls images, and strategies, created by Sigmar Polke.

The splits format allows Ackermann more control over the obliterating techniques she has relied on in the last decade, or two; having the segmented zones has allowed editing to become concentrated thereby taking pressure off overall compositional cohesion. Smartly, this gambit pays off by directing the viewer's reading to both coalesce and fragment.

Rita Ackermann, Reversed Angles, 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas, 94 x 86 x 2 3/8 inches

Overriding the splits scheme is something that reveals itself upon closer inspection, getting past the requisite corpse device, namely a rich theme of riverside tableaus, think: Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Pensive nymphs still appear throughout, often huddling at the edges, or in the recesses. And, there is often a section that can easily be read as a grotto or a passing stream, something hinted at in previous work, but never so explicitly as now.

Rita Ackermann, Sacred Indirection, 2023, acrylic and oil on canvas, 94 x 86 inches

Unlike Tracey Emin, to use one example of contemporary heavy-hitters who have turned to painting in this painting centric moment and who has embraced being immersed in a bit of Giacometti/de Kooning revisionism, Ackermann has always relied on her signature, and instantly recognizable, waifs as a grounding element on which to lay her expressions. While there are similarities between recent Emins’ skeiny picture-building strategies, Ackermann avoids the all-over and, instead, goes for creating more structural atmospheres. Her migration from Acrylics, that had served her in building up the more graphic elements of her repertoire, to oils has contributed immensely to the richness in her work.

Rita Ackermann, Shut Eye, 2023, oil and carpenters pen on canvas, 94 x 86 inches

Rita Ackermann, Shutters, 2023, acrylic, oil and carpenters pen on canvas, 94 x 86 inches

Rita Ackermann, Without Narrative, 2023, oil on canvas, 90 x 82 x 2 1/4 inches

The two paintings not part of the phalanx, Without Narrative and Reversed Angels, both 2023, that serve as what might be referred to as alter pieces in the sense that the quartet of standing girls can be read as angels, with he outlines resembling wings, that peek out from behind these characters, and might in fact alternately be seen as be mountainous terrain in the background. Obviously, all discussion of nuance is dispelled by the revelation of the title of the latter work, that radiates negative to the former, hence the literalness of the title. Both are augmented by swaths of yellow that enlivens and highlights as golden halos of old.

While we are all representatives of our journeys and backgrounds, Rita Ackermann’s work is uniquely representative of the particularly culturally rich era of the Lower East Side in the 90s and, thus, stands as a sort of souvenir of that time.

CODA
I have not dealt with the second exhibition, at the 18th street location of the gallery, focusing on new prints since I did not manage to get over there before the shows closed, something I most assuredly regret. WM