Rita Ackermann


Rita Ackermann is a Hungarian-American artist. She is currently living and working in New York City.

Early life and education

Rita Ackermann was born in Budapest in 1968.
Ackermann trained at the University of Fine Arts Budapest from 1989 until 1992. Ackermann moved to New York City to study at The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. In an interview Ackermann was asked about her choice to move to New York and how it has influenced her work to which her response was,
"It gave me possibilities that I had to choose from and then learn to narrow… narrow things down to their bare existences to find out the reason to make something where everything is already made or readymade. I am an optimist always full of hope that I find my way that is only my way
that is my work."

Career

Rita Ackermann has been featured in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States, Japan and Europe.
Since the mid-1990s Ackermann has been adding to her knowledge of painting and her social comment. "from stained glass to the red ballpoint pen she's applied to runway models' faces in lieu of makeup. She has realized multiform shadow puppet theaters like The Deer Slayer, performed as a band member of the art collaborative Angelblood, and curated exhibitions including The Perfect Man and The Kate Moss Show."
"In both her drawings and collages Ackermann juxtaposes characters and narratives, as in Scorpionun , which draws on the semiotics of fertility charms and pornography to create an Anthropomorphism like womanman- child. The superimposed images composing this life-size freestanding collage on plexiglass come from the artist's own sketches—a row of her lithe women, wearing bowler hats and holding tennis rackets — as well as other sources, such as an illustration of the Madonna and Child positioned over the figure's heart. As Scorpionun's content suggests, Ackermann's interest in constructions of gender and the fantasies that subtend and are sustained by them has survived her transformation of scale and material. Indeed, the oversize cruciform Nun/Skeleton/Cross and comparably large-scale Nun/Mother/Whore revolve around the bifurcated, simultaneously present identities of these objects of desire. The aggregation in these collages' listlike titles is mirrored in the conspicuous overlay of their images: Ackermann does not negate tropes of womanhood but stages them as acts and processes of becoming to be set into dizzying and conflicting relief with and within one another. Few clear plots emerge despite her utilizations of fairy-tale themes, and irrespective of the ingratiatingly beautiful protagonists who inhabit them, neither are there storybook endings."
Her work includes paintings, drawings, t-shirts, a line of underwear, and skateboard designs. Her paintings in the early and mid 1990s featured nymphetish girls.
In 2008 she participated in the Whitney Biennial

Recent

"She's not judgmental, just fascinated by American extremism in all its guises," Ms. Clearwater said.
In recent years Ms. Ackermann's politically and erotically stimulating works have encompassed pictures of society divas portrayed as monsters, talons uncovered. Other paintings denote towards our current day sociocultural climate she found in her adoptive country, a climate she studied without the passion, as if she had microscopic vision on some especially innate life form.
Extracts of car crashes, beggars and lurkers, grimacing cowboys, and scenes of mass mayhem like the Oklahoma City bombing are few of the works we see from Ackermann.
She has strayed away from fashion, but was quick to appear earlier this month at Acme, a new downtown hub for all the artists, while images from her recent video series, "Warfilm," was projected on the walls.
"It gives you a certain freedom," she said, and yes, an air of mystery. "When you are enigmatic, you are untouchable." Says Ackermann.

Solo exhibitions