Lot 16: Burning Ashes, 1998

Burning Ashes, 1998
Oil on canvas.   64 1/2 x 74 in. (163.8 x 188 cm).  Signed, titled and dated "Rita Ackermann 'Burning Ashes' 1998" on the reverse. 

  Rebecca Camhi Gallery, Athens

Ackermann is a magpie stylist, a chameleon, even a sort of painting impersonator on themes of adolescent joy, pain, and effrontery. Her work is often most striking precisely where it most closely resembles something we have seen before. The Salle reminiscences in some of the pictures here--laconic overlay drawing, paint handling as an image of itself, congested texture and irritable color-- suggest formal influence less than vernacular infection, like a funny accent you can't stop talking in…
 
Always with Ackermann, there is a sense of lively, shared artistic lingos that are in the air. They perch on her hand, then fly away. Some of them, hardly hip in themselves, may be in the air because she put them there, such as a charge of the ponderous German Georg Baselitz in her way with paint. Her ventriloquy declares personal motives: first wanting to fashion a negotiable persona for herself as an ambitious young artist in an alien land, then needing to renew emotional roots of a homesick soul. This a common sort of artist's story. Compelling about Ackermann is the unusual nakedness of her quest, which amounts to a coming-of-age in public.
 
P. Schjeldahl, “Teenarama: Rita Ackerman,” The Village Voice, January 27, 1998