Rita Ackermann

New York–based painter Rita Ackermann’s (born 1968) Hidden focuses on a selection of recent paintings, which are placed in relation to the artist’s early works from the 1990s, encompassing nearly 50 paintings and drawings developed over the past 30 years in New York.
In 2022 Ackermann began a new series of paintings titled War Drawings, in which oil, grease pencil and acrylic were heavily worked on rough linen canvas. In these works, figures become lost and lines are scraped away to reveal fragmented compositions. The War Drawings are presented alongside early drawings and paintings that depict adolescent female figures in clonelike multiples who engage in various self-destructive and hazardous activities.

Rita Ackermann’s vibrant, large-scale Mama paintings layer drawings with applications and scrapings of impasto and oil stick, expressing complex histories and emotions. The immersive nature of the Mama suite is fully illustrated and expressed in this book, with a critical essay by Gianni Jetzer that explores and contextualizes Rita’s evolution as an artist and the significance of the Mama works, complementing filmmaker Harmony Korine’s fake interview with Ackermann and a tribute to the artist by Scott Griffin. The importance of Ackermann’s drawings in her painting practice is elucidated in a poem by the artist and seen in the book’s robust plate section, which features all of the Mama paintings made to date.