Rita Ackermann: Hidden

MASI Lugano presents Hidden, one of the largest museum retrospectives to date devoted to the work of Rita Ackermann (Budapest, 1968, lives and works in New York). The exhibition traces the last three decades of this exceptional artist‘s career in a selection of around fifty paintings and drawings created in New York from the 1990s onwards.

Produced in collaboration with the artist, the show presents a number of works dating to shortly after her arrival in the city—works in which the female figures are clearly visible—in dialogue with more recent pieces from the “Mama” series she began working on in 2018, whose figures are concealed under lines and layers of colour. It also includes a selection of paintings created for the occasion, on the topic of war. The layout of the MASI exhibition shows how the artist, after starting out with a figurative aesthetic that was immediately accessible to viewers, later came to rethink the figures that inhabit her works, going so far as to cover them with layers of paint. While the early works are small or medium-sized and mainly on paper, the more recent series, on large format canvases, present a bold, expressive gesturality. This transition, this process, is emblematic of a category-defying path that has enabled the artist to remain unseen and free; “hidden”, as per the title of the exhibition.

Ackermann‘s artistic career has been shaped by the continuous paradox that characterizes her life, starting from her move from Hungary to America in the early 1990s. Rejecting academic trends, the artist developed her own personal practice as an independent painter, in close contact with the art scene of the Lower East Side. When she arrived in the United States, she found herself facing a vital, significant challenge, which led to her integrating different cultures and aesthetics in her work, blending Eastern European and American culture. This fusion of two cultures, from the very first paintings and drawings she produced in New York between 1993 and 1996, can be seen in the exhibition in the sections “Sketchbook Drawings” and “Early Paintings”. Small-and medium-format drawings on paper depict denuded adolescent girls, figures that are multiplied and deliberately put on display in each composition, portrayed engaging in a variety of self-destructive activities. The extremely spontaneous, insouciant attitude of these young women projects a kind of idyllic serenity onto a constantly precarious atmosphere. These ambiguous early works communicate with the viewer on an immediate level, and effectively bridge the gap between high and low culture, just like the myths and folktales the artist often takes inspiration from.

The vivid figures that dominate her early works channel an embryonic feminine energy that twenty-five years later blossoms into the “Mama” series, begun in 2018 and represented in the exhibition with several large-format paintings on canvas. In these paintings the artist abandons defined figures for a practice in which lines, gestures, motifs and forms enclose and conceal one another, gradually becoming more and more evanescent. With its complex layering of visual languages, “Mama” oscillates between figuration and abstraction. The bodies concealed in the images vanish the moment they are perceived: they exist because they merge into gestural elements before their story becomes legible. In contrast to the early works of the 1990s, in which the figures give themselves completely to the viewer‘s gaze, in this series the artist relinquishes all the imagery that might be mistaken for self-referential, thus preventing her own artistic path from being categorized.

The exhibition ends with three paintings from the new series of “War Drawings”, created for the exhibition at MASI. In oil, china marker and acrylic on raw canvas, these are shattered compositions in which the figures dissolve and the lines are scraped away. Each painting appears dominated by disaster, which comes across as a potential purifying force, paving the way for a future harmony.