Before the Letters, 2025. © Rita Ackermann. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
9 September – 17 October 2026 | New York, Wooster Street
Rita Ackermann: The Chemical Alphabet
Rita Ackermann (b. 1968, Budapest, Hungary) moved from Hungary to New York in 1992, where a formative body of work positioned her within the cultural zeitgeist of the city.
Ackermann’s exhibition ‘The Chemical Alphabet’ is on view until October 17 at Hauser & Wirth Wooster Street. In the Chemical Alphabet paintings, Rita Ackermann takes on a new source of vocabulary: letters from a Semitic alphabet. 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.
Peruse the exhibition or attend her talk and then dine in front of Rita Ackermann’s specially-commissioned mural at Manuela.