RITA’S DIGEST
Byline: Alison Beckner
PARIS — The Hungarian born, Texas-based artist Rita Ackermann is best known for her images of eerily endearing, scantily clad, sometimes Darger-esque pre-pubescent girls. For materials, she favors mixed media, including collage, ball-point pen and brushed-on acrylic, and she has been known to finger paint.
But when The Deep Gallery in Paris approached her about a solo show, she immediately knew she would tackle fashion. “Paris-fashion-Paris-fashion+there’s just the connection,” she says.
Titled “Style Show for the Levitation of the Strong American Woman,” Ackermann’s latest works, which went on view last week, are inspired by fashion-oriented events organized by upper middle-class suburban women alongside such charities as the American Women’s Club and the Young Women’s Christian Association.
Ackermann recently began attending these “style-shows,” with her “extremely involved” mother-in-law: dressy gatherings held at a reception hall or in someone’s home with a lunch or dinner followed by a fashion show.
The fashion show, orchestrated by women from the sponsoring charity, typically feature members of the community parading apparel from various sources like mail-order catalogs or local retailers. If the event is theme-oriented, as was the case for the show “A Taste of India,” attended by Ackermann, hosts and attendees dress in native garb and the meal and show are in keeping with the theme.
Ackermann says she was struck by the sincerity of the participants. “The women involved were throwing things together without being pretentious or too self-conscious,” she says.
She also reacted strongly to the idea of what she calls “fashion for a purpose” — in the sense that profits from the shows benefit causes such as disabled children and abused women. “These women want to make themselves useful,” she says.
Ackermann, who counts among her friends the Dutch design team of Viktor & Rolf, explains that she found this treatment of fashion “both exciting and inspiring: Being somebody who has a strong interest in fashion and knowing what people in the fashion world go through, I am intrigued by different ways to approach it.”
That’s why Ackermann designed a small collection of clothing to complement the exhibition’s seven wall paintings. (Ackermann designed similar pieces for Wet Melon, a store in Japan owned by one of her friends, and in the mid-Nineties, she collaborated with Liquid Sky, then a rave headquarters on Lafayette Street, which carried underwear and tops decorated with her drawings and paintings.)
In an approach to fashion design that she describes as instinctual, Ackermann treated fabric as she would a blank canvas and incorporated elements and techniques — color and collage, for example — from the “Style Show” paintings. The message she hopes to convey through the clothes is, surprisingly, not ironic but in keeping with that of the actual suburban style shows: “You can wear it and you can afford it.”