Rita Ackermann: painting as conflict

Rita Ackermann is a punk warrior of the old guard. Born in the Hungarian People’s Republic in 1968, during that year of revolution, Ackermann studied with Károly Klimó at the University of Fine Arts Budapest during the Rendszerváltás, or the fall of Communism, and then moved to the Lower East Side in the early 1990s. In her formative paintings and sketchbook drawings, made in New York between 1993 and 1996, Ackermann depicted prepubescent waifs lounging about, swinging their hips through hula hoops, and gorging on Class-As. These early works were heroin chic on paper, artistic equivalents of the nothing-tastes-as-good-as-skinny-feels fashion scene that turned away from the squeaky-clean health obsessions of the 1980s. But Ackermann made her grungy world of cartoon crack-dens with a high-art sensibility that refused to be fussy or academic. Downtown New York not only exposed her to the cultures around Larry Clark’s skateboarders and the DIY spirit of the waterfront but also the ghosts of Abstract Expressionism. Ackermann quickly integrated gestural brushstrokes over the top of her drawings in a way that 50 years after Ab-Ex’s heyday, was so out of sync with what was cool at the time that it was strikingly chic. “When I came to New York in the 90s and was able to walk up to see pictures of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline”, Ackermann says, “that gave me enormous freedom to paint… I have been looking at the same seven artists my entire life and see something new and surprising each time.”

Ackermann has always been an artist drawn to conflict, both as subject matter and as a process to make art. When I saw her War Drawings at the MASI Lugano last year, I was struck by how the oil paints, acrylic and china marker seemed embroiled in armed combat, vying for space on the raw canvas. In Lugano, Ackermann’s compositions were wrought and fragmentary and the figures in them seemed to dissolve away before your eyes, sometimes drowned under heavy washes of International Klein Blue, as Ackermann scraped their bodies into oblivion. By annihilating them, it’s like Ackermann protected her figures, her young girls, from a worse fate. “Nothing in this world exists without conflict”, Ackermann tells me. “I see conflict as a motor that makes things move out of stillness.” Perhaps surprisingly, given the frenetic battleground of colour in her paintings, it is this stillness that she sees as “something to gain, a state to reach”, but acknowledges that “it is only possible to do so if first we engage in a conflict.”

It’s a truism that today we live in a time of war but we do – we always have. Despite referring to her earlier styles, something of our conflict-heavy present moment is in these new works, spread out across Hauser & Wirth’s two Manhattan galleries, between 18th and 22nd Streets. They are pictures of war, violence and cruelty, as well as beauty. Ackermann’s works on 18th Street are borne from a collaboration with the master printer Keigo Takahashi, who has been printing fine art editions for 25 years and has worked with Cecily Brown, Peter Doig and Richard Prince, amongst others. Takahashi and Ackermann banded together in the former’s silk-screen studio on Flushing Avenue in Maspeth and set out to create a large silkscreen print on paper. “Since we let experimentation take the lead in building up the layers of the print”, Ackermann reflects, “we ended up with seven prints instead of one.” Each print is now available in an edition of 15. This feels appropriate for an artist who has always allowed her extensive collaborative projects – such as the fantastic Sensational Fix (2008) project with Sonic Youth, for instance, or with John Kelsey, or the collective Bernadette Corporation – to be guided by the contingencies of friendship and the moment. “[Collaboration] is always specific and is attached to a certain time period when the collaborators’ lives cross paths”, Ackermann tells me, “and to make passing time together even more memorable and fruitful collaborations happen.”

Surprise plays an important role in all of Ackermann’s works, whether on canvas or on paper, and for the artist, chance “initiates ideas that would lead to something that I have not encountered before… there is no order without chaos.” Takahashi and Ackermann followed the lead of each ‘take’ of printing and arrived with seven different outcomes which, for Ackermann, “were improvised entirely in the printing studio without a pre-meditated plan.” The titles, for instance, 19 Takes (2023), refer to the 19 layers of printing which makes the finished picture. In one 13-colour screen print on watercolour paper, 13 Takes (2023), Ackermann mixes tangential outlines of youthful limbs around the square edge while splatters of blood-red paint fill and consume the centre ground. Some figures are blindfolded and held down; others are dancing and free. In Misfit (2023), a girl crouches down on her knees while a compatriot is locked in a gesture, either a chokehold or a caress. Jutted streaks of thundercloud black and lilac brushstrokes, like air fire, rain down from above. There is a sense that these sketches for these works began in a scatter-brained yet precocious adolescent’s secret diary, but there is something else going on here: the relationship between soaked paint and young girl, between abstraction and figuration, is so vexed as to animate these works with a sense of imminent violence. They are wracked with tension. “Painting itself is a conflict”, Ackermann goes on, “as the artist gets rid of the original perfection of the blank canvas.”

On 22nd Street, Ackermann’s new works are called Splits, so-called because they are divided into three screens, each with its own visual logic and emotional temperature. Cherubic girls, sometimes adorned with wings, seem to whisper about their sins in Without Narrative (2023). In Reversed Angles (2023), those same girls stand en point, washed over with translucent teal paint, while in the depths beyond, different versions of themselves lie about, naked and on their fronts, while yellow lines carve up their bodies. The Splits series has been described by the curator Pamela Kort as marking “a pinnacle in the artist’s ongoing concern with the creation of dynamic, moving images.” The Splits often blend fierce polychromatic paint with drawings of elusive and reticent figures, crouching, hiding, retreating. What are these figures running from? Where will they hide? Ackermann describes the mystery of her process, even to herself, as “a generous disadvantage” for a maker: “This way, all the possibilities that a painting can reveal are set free from the artist’s verbal instinct.” Ackermann’s new works bristle with all the possibilities of painting. The question is whether, like her young sirens, they will be snuffed out before they are realised.