Rita Ackermann

Early life and education

Rita Ackermann was born in Budapest (Hungary) 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

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 (1997), performed as a band member of the art collaborative Angelblood, and curated exhibitions including The Perfect Man (2007) and The Kate Moss Show (2006, with Olivier Zahm)."

"In both her drawings and collages Ackermann juxtaposes characters and narratives, as in Scorpionun (Man on My Breast/Man, Man between My Legs) (2006), 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 (2006) and comparably large-scale Nun/Mother/Whore (2006) 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 design. Her paintings in the early and mid 1990s featured nymphetish girls.

In 2008 she participated in the Whitney Biennial

Solo exhibitions

Selected works