Rita Ackermann

No Time to Think

Price available upon request

2022
Acrylic, oil and china marker on canvas
193 x 170.2 cm / 76 x 67 in
196.2 x 173.4 x 6.4 cm / 77 ¼ x 68 ¼ x 2 ½ in (framed)

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‘Warlords of sorrow and queens of tomorrow
Will offer their heads for a prayer.
You can't find no salvation, you have no expectations
Anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

Mercury, gravity, nobility, humility.
You know you can't keep her and the water gets deeper
That is leading you onto the brink
But there's no time to think.’

—Bob Dylan, No Time to Think, 1978

Ackermann’s paintings communicate a kind of dynamism that derives in part from the sense of urgency that goes into making them. Working on a particular picture often involves entering into the uncertain arena of various rescue operations: unforeseeable problems or intended accidents emerge that the artist must then work around or assimilate. As they move toward their final composition, Ackermann’s paintings reflect the perpetual motion of these various survival missions. As a result, her layered surfaces are haloed with the aura of many residual, activating gestures.

In ‘No Time to Think’ (2022), underlying figures are overlaid with sketches of guns, tanks and vivid detonations of pink and green; thickly applied washes of paint are scraped away at, giving rise to revelatory compositions. The measured intensity by which pigments are worked over communicates the purposeful energy of a distinctly spatial calligraphy. [1]

About the artist

Born in Hungary and based in New York, Rita Ackermann attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest before emigrating to the United States in the early 1990s. Ackermann often starts by freely drawing onto raw canvas—in a similar technique to the automatic drawings of the Dadaists—only to later obscure the lines with layers of oil paint.

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1.) Text adapted from Jeffrey Grunthaner