Hauser & Wirth Gallery, New York, opens the autumn season with a solo show by Rita Ackermann. Her new works are called Chemical Alphabet paintings. Ackermann takes on a new source of vocabulary: letters from the alphabet and the structure of each symbol serves as an anchor for each composition.
The configuration of the letter, painted in acrylic green chalkboard paint on a canvas primed by multiple silkscreen prints, allows the surface to be built through Ackermann’s chalkboard method: layers of pastel and chalk drawings are erased, washed away, and redrawn until multiple states of the painting coexist on the canvas.
Here, the picture advances through accumulation and erasure. At the center of this constructive destruction, the letter remains, its meaning shifting with the evolving image around it.
What stays visible is not the frozen image but the chronicle of its becoming.
The artist’s concern with such visual phenomena is not merely conceptual. Its origins reach back to impulses that began to structure her life, when she relocated from Budapest to New York City. From then on, she began to exist in a median state, defined by a double set of experiences: the one, anchored in a soft-Communist upbringing; the other, a coming of age as an artist in the dream factory of the Big Apple, where she chose to remain.
Though Ackermann’s works may be recursive, they are anchored by improvisation, disruption, and formal negation—the protein of her aesthetic. These elements were shaped in part by her engagement with cinema, particularly the films of Jean-Luc Godard and the theories of Paul Virilio, who viewed perception as structured by montage and fragmentation.
Ackermann’s paintings continue to bear the imprint of visual phenomena—not only in their subject, but in their structure. Images operate cryptically, fractured and charged with interior volatility. Their continual appearance and disappearance suggest that suspension, rather than development, is central to her method. The upshot has been a sustained visual practice that subtly confronts the tensions of the present.
RITA ACKERMANN “THE CHEMICAL ALPHABET” HAUSER & WIRTH GALLERY Through October 2026 www.hauserwirth.com
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