Le Sirenuse

Two young women, painted on canvas, face each other across one of the ‘living rooms’ of Aldo’s Cocktail Bar & Seafood Grill, once the heart of the Sersale family home that predated the hotel. Each has a snake entwined around one arm and something incendiary in the hand of the other. The dominant colours are intense chalk blue, baby pink, muted gold. Innocence and experience battle it out, as they always do.

Ackermann was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1968, and studied at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts before moving to New York in 1992, where she has lived and worked ever since. The opposing impulses of creation and destruction mark the touchstone of her practice, which continues to evolve and manifest itself in the shift from representation to abstraction. Ackermann has exhibited worldwide, with recent solo shows including ‘Brother and Sister’ at Hauser & Wirth Zürich (2019) and ‘Rita Ackermann: Movements as Monuments’ at La Triennale di Milano (2018).