Published to accompany the artist's solo exhibition of the same name at the MASI in Lugano, Hidden contains reproductions of all the works in the exhibition and others selected personally by the artist, Rita Ackermann.
Ackermann was born in Budapest in 1968 and today lives and works in New York. Arriving in America from Hungary in the early 1990s, she is immediately faced with a major challenge: in order to survive in a foreign country as a young artist she must be able to integrate her own cultural aesthetics with those that of the new country that impacts on her artistic practice. Her first drawings and paintings made between 1993 and 1996 show adolescent female figures multiplied within the composition and engaged in various self-destructive activities, expressed to the public through understandable and direct language. About twenty years later Ackermann abandons the figure and develops the series of works he entitles Mama, a set of compositions in which lines and gestures, figures and motifs rise to the surface of the canvas to then dissolve and reappear elsewhere. On the occasion of the exhibition at MASI Lugano, in 2022 Ackermann begins a new series of paintings entitled War Drawings, where oil, grease pencil and acrylic are heavily worked on rough linen canvas. In these works, the figures get lost and the lines are scraped away to reveal fragmented compositions.
Mousse Publishing, 128pp, 33cm × 22cm, hardcover, 2022
