Rita Ackermann: Hidden

Things can be freer and reach higher when they conceal themselves, as demonstrated by Rita Ackermann's artwork. Her drawings and paintings from the early 1990s explored adolescent female figures engaged in self-destructive activities, while her later works, such as Mama and War Drawings, focused on lines, gestures, figures, and motifs that dissolve and reappear on the canvas.

Format: Hardback
Publication date: 01 March 2023
Publisher: Mousse Publishing

Things can be freer and reach higher when they conceal themselves.

Rita Ackermann, a Hungarian artist who currently resides and works in New York, faced a significant challenge upon arriving in America in the early 1990s: to thrive as a young artist in a foreign country, she had to seamlessly integrate the aesthetics of her cultural background with the opportunities presented to her in her artistic practice. Her early drawings and paintings, created between 1993 and 1996, showcased adolescent female figures multiplied within the composition and engaged in various self-destructive activities. These works were expressed to the public through understandable and direct language.

Approximately twenty years later, Ackermann abandoned the figure and embarked on a series of works titled Mama, a collection of compositions where lines, gestures, figures, and motifs emerged and dissolved on the canvas, reappearing elsewhere. On the occasion of the exhibition at MASI Lugano in 2022, Ackermann initiated a new series of paintings entitled War Drawings, where oil, grease pencil, and acrylic were heavily worked on rough linen canvas. In these works, figures became lost, and lines were scraped away to reveal fragmented compositions.

Published on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition at the MASI titled Hidden, this book features reproductions of all the works in the exhibition and additional selections personally chosen by Ackermann.

ISBN-13: 9788867495689