CHAPTER 4 by Rita Ackermann, Andro Wekua

Description:

Rita AckermannAndro Wekua2021Fergus McCaffrey Tokyo2Rita Ackermann & Andro Wekua: Chapter 4Gianni Jetzer

2202 1990 1980Dos and Donts 2008-2009 15 NursesSistersMamas(she)20022 FAX Chpater1Chapter2Chapter3 NievesE 2008 21

EXHIBITION:

Rita Ackermann & Andro Wekua: Chapter 4
202151- 731
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11:00-19:00

Official Press Release:

Fergus McCaffrey Tokyo is delighted to present a unique exhibition bringing together two artists who are long-time allies, some-time collaborators, and singular personalities for a dual-person show that traces inspiration and creative exchange through some twenty years. Grounded in a common experience of bankrupt Soviet idealism, systemic repression, eventual exile, and the immigrant experience, Rita Ackermann and Andro Wekua both left the Eastern Block in the 1990s to pursue careers abroad. While Ackermanns art retains few references to her early life in Hungary and is absorbed in her experience of America from the late 1980s to the present day, Wekuas art enigmatically clings to an unclear recent-past. Ackermann and Wekua are part of a lineage that includes their fellow Easterners Georg Baselitz and Sigmar Polke, in that they borrow widely from folk and fairy tales, invoke high and low culture, and navigate a path between state-mandated realism and the perceived allure of American gestural abstraction. Further, it is impossible not to reference two earlier displaced Europeans: Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, who seem to provide material and spiritual nutrition in finding a path between figuration, landscape, and pure abstraction. Wekua begins with collages of animals, palm trees, inwardly consumed adolescents, and abandoned domestic spaces that become gradually obliterated and transformed under layers of bright pinks, purples, acid yellows, turquoises, and magentas that evoke the color palette of Rothko. His vibrant hues contain all of the elder artists contradictions in the apparent elation and the tugging sense of desperation. It is a personal art drawn from a specific place and time, but which has universal resonance despite or because of its stubborn evasiveness. Though Wekuas scale of works and methods are significantly different, both feel psychically fraught and born of struggle. Scraped down and distressed in the making, Wekuas means are very evident to behold; loaded with materials and meaning. Portraiture and self-portraiture are amongst Wekuas most pressing concerns, and a sense of unease and discomfort is evoked that whispers of alienation and longing. However, the presumptions or certitude of portraiture is confounded, with identities that are constructed, ambiguities embraced, meanings deferred, and truths evasive. Ackermann shares the same layering, coding, and disclosure of source imagery, which often appears distracting and at odds with itself, perhaps reflecting a layer of self-defense against prying eyes and pervasive surveillance. Her Dos and Donts paintings (2008-09) are built from montages cut and pasted from magazines and photocopied books, which she amended with graphite and oil crayon, adding outlines, silhouettes, and textures; blurring the distinction between the source imagery and her own. Over the last 15 years her female protagonists have been grouped as Nurses, Sisters, or Mamas, reflecting, complying, rebelling, or simply ignoring the imposed stereotypes and fictive constructs of femininity. Though her subjects bear a strong resemblance to Ackermann herselfreimagined as a doe-eyed manga charactershe remains enigmatically serene and mute, while Ackermanns free facility in hand painting, bravura oil stick, and sinuous chalk drawing intuitively respond in distinct gestures to the underlying cacophony of compressed layers both real and otherwise. A 2002 introduction by a mutual friend, Gianni Jetzer, brought the like-minded practitioners into a shared process of creative trade that began by fax, and quickly became a self-published zine: Chapter 1; subsequently published by Nieves (Switzerland) for Chapter 2 and Chapter 31 . Drawing on, from, and through a shared psyche of pictures, music, poetry, and plain talk, these remote communications manifest through various modes of technology: landline, voicemail, text, email, and image exchange that implies distance itself as key to the closeness of their preoccupation, up to now: Chapter 4. The paintings and collages from the two artists that make up this Tokyo exhibition range specifically from 2008 to 2021, while more broadly addressing a shared understanding that seems to have begun well in advance of Ackermann and Wekuas initial meeting. That they cannot travel to Japan to experience the fruits of this 21st century dialogue in-person together, does not diminish the strength or resonance of that unity. For those of us who see it, and those of us who do not.