Rita Ackermann “KLINE RAPE”

Hauser & Wirth (548 W 22nd St.)

This event has ended.

Hauser & Wirth presents ‘KLINE RAPE’, an exhibition of new paintings by Rita Ackermann at the gallery’s new temporary home at 548 West 22nd Street. The exhibition will feature two bodies of work by the artist: Stretcher Bar Paintings and the KLINE RAPE series. ‘KLINE RAPE’ will also feature a performance by Ieva Misevičiūte, a new, site-specific work inspired by Ackermann’s paintings. Performances will take place within the exhibition.

Gean Moreno on the work of Rita Ackermann:

There is no ideal compositional balance or aim sought to guide the effort, no external metric to judge the work’s success. It’s only the experimentation, which much to do with cumulative effects as with negational gestures and undermining, with the piling up of contradictory elements and disjunctions, that slowly congeals into something. Whatever tension and affective charge the work ends up with is intrinsic to its development. A machine that ruthlessly disorganizes its own forms and tears itself from expectation. Her paintings feel as if they can turn themselves into intense field of tension by dismantling incessantly whatever forms and materials are applied to them. Disjunction and incommensurability animate them. They’ve arrived at a strange threshold of production: they seem to make themselves. In fact, each is a testament to Ackermann’s tenacious catching up to them and the work’s indefatigable drive to push on, to stay ahead of the body that makes them.

Ackermann’s Stretcher Bar Paintings take their title from the emergence of x-ray-like imprints that surface when impressions of paint and pigment exert a structural presence on the picture plane itself. Rather than correcting the effect, Ackermann has decided to embrace it, “forging the series after their disadvantage.” Proportioned to the human body, the fractured compositions allow background and foreground to collapse; the paintings reveal only as much as they conceal.