Essay
What Absence Is Made Of / Rita Ackermann
Exhibition catalogue, Sammlung Friedrichshof, Schlebrügge Editor 2016
Quote:
"The artist deliberately erases the source material from which it unfolds, and then, doubtly, erases this very operation of erasure by turning the smudged lines, the evaporation of water, the wiping of the hand into an abstract painting. The lines of the canvas's surface state what they negate, and negate what they state. The intact and pained bodies of the nymphets have been eradicated and replaced by a discourse on violence intrinsic to the act of creation of the work itself. Left without any explicitly autobiographic elements, we can only read human presence in its violent absence."
