Published on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition at the MASI in Lugano, this book traces the last thirty years of Rita Ackermann's career containing both well-known and previously unpublished works, ranging from painting to drawing, created in a range of media and formats.
Rita Ackermann's first drawings and paintings, made between 1993 and 1996, show adolescent female figures multiplied within the composition and engaged in various self-destructive activities, expressed to the public through understandable and direct language. Twenty years down the line, Ackermann rethinks the presence of the figure as the focus of her work, endowing it with new connotations and reworking it through a layering of subjects and matter. The book contains reproductions of all the works in the exhibition, and others selected personally by the artist.
New York City based artist Rita Ackerman was born in Budapest in 1968. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest and The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture from the years of 1989 to 1992. Ackermann invented images that became instant sensations, perturbing young girls that are now part of the universe of global imagery. Her drawings and paintings between 1993-95 depict compositions of adolescent female figures of clonelike multiples engaging in various self-destructive and hazardous activities. Her early works with their ambiguous presence serve as bridges between high and low culture, just as the myths and folk tales which often serve as merits to Ackermann's compositions. Later, Ackerman would abandon the figure, erasing the very matter of her own work, in a complex layering of visual language oscillating between abstraction and figuration into a subconscious unfolding of form—concealed deeply in the abstraction of the omnipresence.
