Rita Ackermann’s ‘Red Dots’ (2020) encapsulates the artist’s inimitable approach to painting and her ability to instinctively conjure complex visual compositions. Born in Budapest and based in New York, Ackermann attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Hungary before emigrating to the United States in the early 1990s. Graceful and gestural at once, her vivid works oscillate between figuration and abstraction, as forms appear and disappear on the canvas. Similar to the automatic drawings of the Dadaists, Ackermann often starts by freely drawing onto raw canvas, only to later obscure the delicate lines with layers of acrylic and oil paint.
In ‘Red Dots’, two figures sitting next to each other seem to emerge from a maelstrom of colour, their bodies blurring into swathes of cerulean, teal, and chartreuse, their black contours developing a life of their own. Green and red dots are scattered over the pair, further obscuring the figures into abstraction. The bright vermillion of the dots and overlaying lines stand in contrast to the otherwise blue and green colour palette, creating an almost palpable vibrancy. Executed alongside Ackermann’s ‘Mama’ series, recently shown at Hauser & Wirth’s spaces in Monaco, Zurich, and New York, ‘Red Dots’ exemplifies the artist’s extraordinary oeuvre and her continuous interrogation of line, colour, and form.
