“Rita Ackermann: Doubles,” Hauser & Wirth, Paris, 2025

Rita Ackermann’s exhibition “Doubles” at Hauser & Wirth, Paris, starts as a sketch: Five near-identical nymphs lounge around; one smokes, another is daydreaming. A third clenches her fist, reaching toward a fourth who replies with a soft glance. They’re in the middle of something – or maybe they’re just bored. Only the last nymph seems to comprehend their sweet mystery, writing – or sketching – everything down, with one hand over her mouth. Is she the artist? [1] If the doppelgänger can be read in the Freudian sense of an authority that “can treat the rest of the ego as an object,” [2] how deep does Ackermann’s “double” go? Hung in the first room of the exhibition, and the genesis of all the other works on display, this scene depicted in Sketchbook Drawing 3 (1993) becomes the means for the artist to sound this depth. Blurring original and copy, artist and commodity, Ackermann returns not only to her past but also to the fundamental possibilities of painting: the expression of the “soul” in the age of the digitized double.

Ackermann’s double is, first of all, technical: The original drawing from the artist’s sketchbook has been blown up and reproduced on six large canvases that comprise the main series, Doubles. These works also feature reproductions of two graphite studies that are also included in the exhibition: Study after Double 1 (2024) and its second version (2025), both made after the first “copy” in the series, Double 1 (2024, note the singular in the title). [3] A series of works on paper, Shadows (nos. 3, 4, and 5, all 2025), then adds further disturbance to the repetition, deconstructing the printed images to the point where the nymphs appear only as evanescent colors or contours.

This movement toward abstraction is important, for Ackermann’s Doubles are far from being purely post-Warholian exercises; the artist’s “hand” is overwhelmingly present. Overlaying print onto print, in slightly different positions, Ackermann underscores the imperfection and instability of each reproduction, producing a blur: a fleeting, almost cinematic movement. She then doubles down on this effect through the way she plays with her own gesture, reworking the printed image with acrylic, oil, crayon, and cold wax in various ways: hand-painting lines that retrace and reimagine the contours of the nymphs, as in Doubles 8 (2025), or completely exaggerating them, as in Double 1. This visual confusion is, however, very composed, with Ackermann using both the borders of raw canvas and the edges of the silkscreen to structure the various layers into foregrounds and backgrounds, sometimes lending the works a vertiginous sense of depth, as in Doubles 1 (2025). This illusion is echoed by certain motifs that reemerge across the series: a dense mass of figures that haunt the background, a particular focus on the reaching hand of one nymph in the foreground, and diaphanous washes of white that play with opacity and transparency between layers.

Rita Ackermann, “Double 1,” 2024

Yet even once these overlapping modes of image-making have been understood, it remains difficult to recognize which is what, or what came first, just like in any narrative of doubles. This ambiguity is materially reinforced by the thinned, washed-out textures of the printing inks absorbed into the unprimed canvas; they blend and literally bleed into Ackermann’s own brushstrokes, layers disappearing into one another. This effect becomes even more evident when the works are considered as an ensemble: While none of them looks (too much) like any other, neither does any of them seem different enough to stand apart from the series. This allows a very ambivalent idea of singularity to surface. Doubles could go on and on, with Ackermann continually exhausting painting’s compositional and conceptual dichotomies: figuration and abstraction; appearance and disappearance; aura and reproduction; and so on.

These oppositions have always been central to Rita Ackermann’s practice, from her chalkboard painting-palimpsests to the hesitant, ephemeral bodies in her Mama series (2018–20). More particularly, in works such as Hidden (2022) and her recent exhibition “Splits” (Hauser & Wirth, New York), Ackermann seems to have already revisited Sketchbook Drawing 3, with the same colors and figures appearing in works such as Shutters (2024) or Sacred Indirection (2024). While these gestures of self-appropriation are not new in her work – Ackermann remade her now iconic painting Get a Job (1993) as Heroines 2 in 2014 – they have never been as explicit as in Doubles. Here, Ackermann exhibits the original alongside its many “copies,” constantly looping back to an era – the mid ’90s – when digital technologies were only just starting to be incorporated into painting, an era when Ackermann herself, with her now signature nymph paintings, became somewhat of a viral phenomenon. [4]

Key figures from this period thus appear in shadows of these works: Christopher Wool, in the same mid-’90s moment, started experimenting with the reproduction of his own work, making screen prints of his existing paintings and exhibiting them as authentic originals, the idiosyncrasies of layered enamel replaced by half-tone flatness. In the early 2000s, this logic was then taken further by artists such as Wade Guyton, who began using an Epson printer to create abstract works on canvas, as well as on tables and mattresses (with Kelley Walker, as GuytonWalker). For both artists, in that newly digital (post)modern era when the commodity form had come to saturate virtually all terms of existence, painting was a critical medium insofar as it was used against itself, with digital technology allowing for the further evacuation of the individualistic forms of self-expression intrinsic to the logic of late capitalism. [5] The artist – and the attendant notions of self and authenticity – had been completely displaced by the machine, the limits of each redefined without ever entirely collapsing.

In Doubles, this collapse happens in retrospect. Although differently to Wool and Guyton, Ackermann has also continually experimented with this interpenetration of painting as commodification, or more precisely, as merchandise – that is, as a derivative, branded product. Since the early ’90s, the artist has independently produced T-shirts, underwear, skateboards, and other items alongside her painted canvases, a DIY counter-cultural practice that, decades later, has evolved into collaborations with the streetwear brand Supreme. [6] Through continually and intentionally blurring the line between the hand and the silk screen, artist and brand, Ackermann didn’t so much evacuate the self but sell it off, exploring the signature image as a multiplying and monetizing force that is not extraneous to her work but an integral part of the way that painting circulates and disappears.

“Rita Ackermann: Doubles,” Hauser & Wirth, Paris, 2025

This is what makes the works in Doubles compelling: that they stage both Ackermann’s authenticity as a painter and its artificial multiplication, collapsing one into the other. Not only is it impossible to tell original from copy, print from painting, but Ackermann (the artist) and Ackermann (the commodity) also become lost in the infra-deep surface of the canvases. This could be framed as a superficially complex, auto-reflexive feedback loop. But through the artist’s staging of “now” and “then,” and through the ambiguously generic and autobiographical quality of her nymphs, the works can be read in relation to the double as a more universal contemporary phenomenon, namely as a ubiquitous economic imperative. For as these works remind us, the line between self and product have never been more intensely blurred than in this era of platform capitalism: think content algorithms modelled on user behavior, AI avatars (Lensa, HereAfter, Memojis …), online profiles, and countless performative modes (boss, God, beast, turbo …) activated in order to double oneself for the sake of increased productivity. [7]

While Doubles is by no means an overt exploration of these dynamics or systems, Ackermann uses painting as a means to re-interrogate the possibility (and problem) of the contemporary subject’s expression – its value and veracity – within the bind of its increasing doubles. For within this aesthetic of collapse or confusion, or even in spite of it, these works are most arresting when the ambiguity itself appears authentic – when the scribble or gash of color feels neither human nor mechanical, but like something else, an undecidable in-between. Perhaps an impossible aura [8] or something like a soul, neither cleansed nor corrupted. [9] This is the abstract, metaphysical vertigo that Ackermann actually represents: the artist endlessly trying to resuscitate the soul of painting while her (and our) many selves split off, her hand over her mouth.

“Rita Ackermann: Doubles,” Hauser & Wirth, Paris, June 11–October 4, 2025.

Aodhan Madden is a writer and artist based in Paris.

Image credits: 1., 3. © Rita Ackermann, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, photos Nicolas Brasseur; 2. © Rita Ackermann, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, photo Dario Lasagni