Subheadline: In Soho, the Hungarian-born, New York-based artist combines Semitic letters, chalkboard paint, silkscreen, and pastel to explore how images emerge, disappear, and take on new meanings.
A painting is usually understood as a finished image: a composition preserved on canvas, ready to be viewed and interpreted. Rita Ackermann challenges that assumption. In The Chemical Alphabet, her paintings appear less like settled statements than records of an ongoing struggle between creation and destruction, where every mark carries traces of what came before.
Presented at Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street gallery in Soho, the exhibition brings together paintings from Ackermann’s developing Chemical Alphabet series. On view from September 9 through October 17, 2026, the presentation introduces a new visual vocabulary built around letters from a Semitic alphabet. These symbols provide structural anchors for compositions that otherwise remain fluid, layered, and resistant to a single interpretation. <Cite refs={[“turn570888search1″,”turn570888search2”]}/>
The exhibition’s title suggests a language formed through reactions between different elements. In Ackermann’s paintings, those elements include letters, abstract marks, fragments of imagery, and the physical properties of the materials themselves. Their interaction produces pictures that are simultaneously constructed and undone.
For an artist whose practice has long explored fragmentation, improvisation, and the unstable appearance of images, the alphabet becomes a new point of departure rather than a fixed system of communication.
A New Alphabet for an Unfinished Image
Ackermann was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1968 and moved to New York in 1992. Her work has developed through a sustained engagement with painting, drawing, figuration, and abstraction, often allowing recognizable images to emerge only to become partially obscured or transformed. <Cite refs={[“turn570888search1″,”turn570888search8”]}/>
In The Chemical Alphabet, the letter becomes a compositional anchor. It offers a recognizable structure around which the rest of the painting can shift. The symbol may suggest language, but the image does not necessarily deliver a straightforward message. Instead, the letter remains embedded within an evolving field of marks and visual fragments.
This tension between legibility and uncertainty is central to the exhibition. Letters are among the most familiar visual forms people encounter, yet their meaning depends on systems of language and context. Ackermann takes this familiarity and places it within paintings that resist conventional reading.
The result is a visual language that can be experienced before it is decoded. The viewer encounters the rhythm of marks, the weight of color, and the movement of forms before deciding whether the image offers a coherent narrative at all.
That openness is not a failure of communication. It is part of the work’s method. Ackermann makes room for a painting to register emotionally and physically without requiring every element to resolve into a clear explanation.
The Chalkboard Method: Building Through Erasure
The exhibition’s distinctive surfaces emerge from Ackermann’s use of what the gallery describes as her chalkboard method. She applies acrylic green chalkboard paint to canvases prepared with multiple silkscreen prints, then builds layers of pastel and chalk drawings. These marks are repeatedly erased, washed away, and redrawn. <Cite refs={[“turn570888search1″,”turn570888search3”]}/>
The process gives the paintings an unusual relationship to time. A mark may remain visible, become partially obscured, or disappear beneath a subsequent gesture. What the viewer sees is therefore not simply the final stage of a linear progression, but a surface in which several moments of making appear to coexist.
Erasure becomes productive rather than merely corrective. Removing an image does not necessarily restore the canvas to a neutral state; it changes the relationships between the marks that remain. Even when a form disappears, its previous presence can influence the composition around it.
This method also complicates the familiar distinction between finished and unfinished art. The canvases are complete works, yet they retain evidence of uncertainty, revision, and chance. Their surfaces suggest that an image can remain active even after the artist has stopped working on it.
Ackermann’s use of silkscreen adds another layer to this process. Repeated printed elements establish a foundation, while the chalk and pastel gestures interrupt that structure with more immediate, changeable marks. Mechanical reproduction and hand-drawn improvisation meet on the same surface.
Selected Works and the Energy of Contradiction
The exhibition includes works with titles such as Boy Let Dog Out (2026), Sweet Disposition (2026), Bullet Proof (2026), When the Lion Lies Down with the Lamb (2026), In the Valley of the Missing Link (2026), and Silent Type (2025). Other paintings include Tangled Up in Blue (2025), Before the Letters (2025), and In Formation (2025). <Cite refs={[“turn570888search1″,”turn570888search3”]}/>
The titles establish a suggestive counterpoint to the paintings themselves. Some evoke familiar phrases or situations; others introduce associations with animals, vulnerability, silence, or the organization of forms. Yet the titles do not function as definitive explanations. They create additional possibilities for interpretation without closing down the images.
Silent Type, for example, places the idea of language alongside the possibility of silence. In Formation suggests the emergence of structure, while Before the Letters points toward a moment prior to the establishment of a readable system. Such titles can be approached as invitations to look, rather than instructions about what a painting must mean.
Across the series, Ackermann’s approach allows familiar and unfamiliar elements to remain in tension. The letters offer stability, but the surrounding marks continually unsettle it. The image seems to form and dissolve at once.
That contradiction is part of the paintings’ energy. Their surfaces register both control and improvisation, giving viewers the sense that the composition is still negotiating its own terms.
Why the Alphabet Matters
An alphabet is a system designed to make communication possible. Its symbols acquire meaning through convention, repetition, and shared understanding. Ackermann’s use of letters from a Semitic alphabet introduces that recognizable structure into a practice built around uncertainty and transformation. <Cite refs={[“turn570888search1″,”turn570888search8”]}/>
Rather than treating the symbols as straightforward illustrations of language, she uses their shapes as compositional forces. Their forms help organize the canvas, but the paintings resist being reduced to translations or fixed messages.
This distinction matters because it shifts attention from what a symbol says to what it does. A letter can establish balance, interrupt a gesture, or provide a point of reference within a turbulent surface. Its meaning is affected by everything that happens around it.
The paintings therefore operate between reading and looking. They invite viewers to recognize the presence of language while also experiencing the limits of interpretation. Meaning becomes something that develops through contact with the work, not something entirely settled before the encounter begins.
A Practice Shaped by Disappearance and Return
Ackermann’s earlier work often brought together fragmented figures, semi-transparent bodies, and bold contours. Her broader practice has been influenced by cinema, including the films of Jean-Luc Godard, and by ideas about perception, montage, and fragmentation. The gallery describes her work as a sustained exploration of improvisation, disruption, and the repeated appearance and disappearance of images. <Cite refs={[“turn570888search1″,”turn570888search8”]}/>
The Chemical Alphabet extends these concerns through a new organizing principle. The letter gives the composition a point of stability, but it cannot prevent the surrounding image from changing. The painting becomes a space where structure and instability depend on one another.
This approach also resists the expectation that an artist must explain every work in order for it to be understood. Ackermann has emphasized the importance of a painting’s direct effect on the viewer, suggesting that the encounter can remain meaningful even when it cannot be fully articulated. <Cite refs={[“turn570888search1″,”turn570888search2”]}/>
That position offers a useful way to approach the exhibition. Rather than searching for a single hidden code, visitors can pay attention to how the paintings behave: where the eye settles, which marks appear to survive, and how the image changes as one looks longer.
A Final Look at Hauser & Wirth Soho
At Hauser & Wirth’s 134 Wooster Street location, The Chemical Alphabet presents Ackermann’s paintings as records of becoming. The exhibition brings the artist’s established interest in fragmentation and improvisation into contact with the unfamiliar structure of the alphabet, producing images that remain open to change even when they are materially complete. <Cite refs={[“turn570888search0″,”turn570888search1”]}/>
The show closes October 17, 2026, making this its final week as of October 15. The gallery is free to visit and open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. <Cite refs={[“turn570888search0″,”turn570888search2”]}/>
Ultimately, The Chemical Alphabet asks viewers to reconsider what a painting can be. It can preserve a moment while revealing the marks of earlier moments; it can use symbols without surrendering to fixed meanings; and it can become more expressive through acts of erasure.
Ackermann’s paintings do not simply present images. They show how images come into being, how they are interrupted, and how something meaningful can remain after much of the original gesture has disappeared.
