*Rita Ackermann, Mouchette in Hollywood, 2024, Oil, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 110 x 108 in, 279.4 x 274.3 cm*

I first heard her name through a long-term collector of mine, who wasn’t describing her paintings in technical terms, but with awe: “It’s like something being born and erased at the same time. The energy is indescribable, you have to see it in person!”

That was my introduction to Rita Ackermann, the Hungarian born, New York based artist whose canvases exist in a state of constant becoming, where gesture and erasure, memory and abstraction, coexist.

Born in Budapest in 1968, Ackermann moved to New York in the early 1990s and quickly became part of its downtown avant-garde. Her early chalk and pastel drawings, often depicting adolescent girls on the verge of rebellion, captured the uneasy tension between innocence and chaos.

Nearly three decades later, her artistic voice reached a new resonance in the Manna Rain series.
One of the paintings shows a girl covering her eyes, suspended above a cloud of grey and white stains and diagonal brushstrokes, an image evoking a torrential downpour and directly referencing Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1970).

*Untitled, 1971, Cy Twombly, oil-based house paint, oil paint, wax crayon and lead pencil on canvas,147.64 x 195.9 cm*

Ackermann has long acknowledged Twombly’s influence. In the mid-1990s she began her own Chalkboard Paintings, washing away parts of her drawings to create ghostly, semi-abstract compositions. “I was around 22 when I made my first Cy influenced works as a student,” she recalls. “Over the decades the affection looped back again and again.”

*Cy Twombly, Treatise on the Veil(Second Version), 1970 [Rome], oil-based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 118 ⅛ × 393 ⅝ inches (300 × 999.8 cm), © Cy Twombly Foundation*

In her latest exhibition Manna Rain, held in Twombly’s former home in Bassano in Teverina, she pays direct homage to his legacy. The show takes inspiration from Twombly’s monumental Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) (1970), a 33-foot canvas from his Blackboard series. Working within the exact dimensions of Twombly’s original, Ackermann created her mural Ubiquitous (Outside of Time and Space) , a meditation on presence, rhythm, and rain.

*Rita Ackermann, Manna rain, exhibition view at Fondazione Iris*

Like Twombly, she works with oil, crayon, and pastel, yet her sensibility is unmistakably her own. Manna Rain is not an imitation but a continuation: where Twombly traced the motion of thought, Ackermann traces the memory of emotion. The “manna”, biblical nourishment that descended like dew, is reimagined as an image of creative sustenance, an endless downpour of consciousness.

Her “gesture” language recalls de Kooning’s feral energy, Twombly’s lyrical abstraction, Rauschenberg’s layering, and Matisse’s emotional use of line and color, yet her approach is inward, feminine, and deeply intuitive.

Standing before one of her canvases, you sense both stillness and movement, creation and dissolution unfolding at once. Ackermann doesn’t depict the world; she mirrors how it feels to live inside it.

Collector Notes

Rita Ackermann’s practice charts one of the most intriguing evolutions among her generation，from the raw figuration of the 1990s downtown New York scene to the gestural, near-abstract language of her recent years. Her trajectory mirrors a gradual internalization: from drawing the visible to revealing the invisible.

Collectors who first encountered her early chalk and pastel works, rebellious, erotic, and psychologically charged, often recognize that same intensity transformed, decades later, into the layered surfaces of her Chalkboard Paintings and Manna Rain. What once was figure has become trace; what once was voice has become echo.

Ackermann’s dialogue with Cy Twombly forms a crucial thread throughout her oeuvre. Like Twombly, she treats the act of erasure not as negation but as revelation. Yet her sensibility is distinctly feminine, intuitive, emotional, almost devotional.

In today’s market, her position sits between postwar abstraction and contemporary narrative painting, appealing to collectors who seek both intellectual depth and historical continuity.
Her institutional recognition has grown steadily, with solo exhibitions in Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, and, most notably, her 2024 project at Cy Twombly’s former home in Fondazione Iris, Italy.

Collectors drawn to Twombly, de Kooning, or Joan Mitchell often find Ackermann’s canvases compelling for their balance between chaos and restraint, an expression of emotional abstraction rooted in both memory and form. Her market remains relatively under-recognised compared to her male predecessors, suggesting further potential for revaluation as institutions and major collections continue to embrace her narrative.

For collectors, Ackermann represents not only a painter of exceptional instinct, but an artist rewriting the emotional vocabulary of abstraction for a new era.

Rita Ackermann: Manna Rain — Between Chaos and Grace