Los Angeles...In anticipation of Frieze Los Angeles, Hauser & Wirth will present an Artist's Choice Online Viewing Room, featuring a series of six never-before-seen works by Rita Ackermann. Complementing the artist's exhibition, Mama '19, on view in the New York gallery beginning 20 February, this online presentation highlights Ackermann's drawing practice, which often serves as a framework for her paintings and is integral to her work.

In this series, figurative sketches are rendered in outlines exploring imagery built through varying forms of visual language. Ackermann absorbs imagery and transposes it through automatist gestures–her work rejects efforts to read into its iconographies. The artist describes her images as the product of 'automatic gestures, a subconscious unfolding on the canvas.' Hers is a study of relationships–between figuration and abstraction, between personal and collective experience–offered up for the viewer to ponder. Incorporating pencil and graphite, and using oil paint at times to stain the page and illuminate areas, these layered sketches function as independent productions within her practice.

The works are available for purchase online only. The site will open on 10 February at 12 pm PST and remain on view through 23 February 2020.

Ackermann and Hauser & Wirth will donate 100 percent of the proceeds from the purchase of the works online to the avant-garde downtown Manhattan theatre company, The Wooster Group, in support of their campaign to keep open The Performing Garage, their permanent space at 33 Wooster Street.

For more information please see: thewoostergroup.org

About The Wooster Group

The Wooster Group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, is a company of artists who make work for theatre, dance, and media. All of The Wooster Group's work is developed at The Performing Garage and then performed at other venues throughout the U.S. and internationally. The Group also makes The Performing Garage available as an incubator for work by young experimental theatre artists.

Press release courtesy Hauser & Wirth.