Shadow Fux: The first collaborative work of New York artist Rita Ackermann and Nashville based director Harmony
Korine consistes of large-scale paintings on vinyl and canvas, several drawings as well as one film, creating a grand
presentation with dissonant overtones.
Central to the praxis of both is the creation of psychologically jarring figures, whose presence is further enhanced by
fragmented narratives. Produced in a call and response method, the collaboration illustrates the importance of cutting
to both artists' works. Editing and splicing, Ackermann and Korine insert absurdist moments into narrative tropes,
subverting plotlines and ultimately defying our expectations towards story telling. Shadow Fux aims to create a veritable alien, who stalks the viewer from the fringe. The eerie paintings and their filmic
complements are an unyielding monument to the freak, the hysteric, the rake, and the eccentric.
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.
Harmony Korine is one of the most significant artists of his generation. After emerging onto the world stage in the 1990's as a screenwriter (Kids) and director (Gummo; Julien Donkey-Boy), his intuitive, open-ended approach to realism created a polarizing fervor amongst critics.
Lesser known but no less relevant are Korine's experiments outside the world of cinema. A Crack-up At The Race Riots, his first book, adapted the possibilities of his brand of montage to text. Numerous collaborations with other artists (such as Christopher Wool, Brian DeGraw, Gus Van Sant and Mark Gonzales) further stretched Korine's imagination into realms of formalized abstraction, vaudeville, black metal nihilism, and ambient soundscapes.
