Rita Ackermann, "Mothership" (2009). Mixed media, 72 x 96 in.

October 2009 Reviews

Iran Inside Out

PLOT: This World and Nearer Ones

Frank Haines

Daughters of the Revolution

Parrworld

Mona Hatoum

Marina Abramovic Presents…

Donald Judd Rita Ackermann A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s Dia’s Big Day The Art of Eating Philippe Vergne on the Future of Dia A Paper Ball Donald Judd Sculptures Restored in Texas

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"Marfa/Crash," Rita Ackermann’s sixth exhibition at Galerie Peter Kilchmann, is the product of her recent residency at the Chinati Foundation, Donald Judd’s home turned artist colony in Marfa, Texas, and through it we see whether, in the barren West Texas landscape, she was able to leave her cosmopolitan femininity behind. Ackermann did bring something with her to Marfa: Get a Job, a 1993 drawing of five women that appears in various permutations in the exhibition, most directly in Mothership, in which the original, crisp lines are reinvented as thick and urgent. Only three of the women appear here: one now masturbates; another has been reduced to a blue, alienlike head. Ackermann uses molding paste and tempera, and the pigment is lumped and cracked on the creased industrial canvas.

Throughout her career, Ackermann has submitted her exotic-looking, perennially adolescent self-portraits to historical styles. The thick paint and high-impact brushstrokes here reference haute pâte, the term for Jean Dubuffet’s use of muddy impasto as an organic tabula rasa after the trauma of World War II — which Ackermann reinterprets in a psychedelic, scorching, and quite feminine color palette.

For Ackermann, the ground is less a solid foundation than a place for constant damage and renewal. Vertical Horizon is one of three canvases propped on cinder blocks and leaned against the gallery’s columns. The canvas is cut through the middle to reveal the support of the stretcher; she’s cropped and collaged a crashed car, so that the damage to the car is erased and reenacted by her own cuts. 

"Rita Ackermann" originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2009 Table of Contents.