While Rita Ackermann was composing her “Splits” (2023–24) series – a body of work bound together by the picture planes’ division into three horizontal “screens” – the artist returned to an unfinished canvas from her “Chalkboard Paintings” (2013–18). For these, Ackermann applied chalk to stretched fabric primed with chalkboard paint before partially removing the chalk with large painterly gestures that required physical effort, irrespective of the limestone’s fragile materiality. Yet some of the finely drawn chalk figures can still be discerned under the hazy white erasure marks: In the bottom right corner of “Splits in Chalk,” the motif of Ackermann’s TEXTE ZUR KUNST edition, two seated humans lightly embrace one another. The nymph-like characters can be traced back not just to Édouard Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (1863) but – with the help of Aby Warburg’s “Atlas” – all the way to ancient sarcophagi.In a skinny waif look, similarly shaped female bodies also populate Ackermann’s “Who Are We? What Are We? Where Did We Come From?” (1994). This spin on Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian tableau was exhibited in a window of the New Museum shortly after the Hungarian artist had come to New York. As Ackermann recently recalled, she had arrived in the city with the aim of having her art seen, but its quick recognition led to a desire to hide her characteristic visual vocabulary. This play of perception and disappearance is something the artist has since never split with: In “Splits in Chalk,” the frieze of abstract bodies, composed of heavy layers of soft pastels and hefty black contours reminiscent of those delineating some of Henri Matisse’s nudes, also causes the disappearance of some of the “Chalkboard Paintings” base.