–artist’s premier show at galerie allen–

Vivre Sa Vie

Hungarian-American Artist

RITA ACKERMANN

Thursday, 5^th November 2026, 19h – 20h

Guided Visit by Joseph Allen Shea
Gallery Director

Galerie Allen
6 passage Sainte-Avoye
75003 Paris
Access from 8, rue Rambuteau

M°11 Rambuteau

ABOUT THE ARTIST / EXHIBITION

Rita Ackermann (b. 1968, Budapest) is a Hungarian-born, New York–based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. After studying at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest, she moved to New York in 1992, where she became part of the city’s vibrant downtown art scene. Her early drawings and paintings combined figurative imagery, fantasy, sexuality, and elements of popular and underground culture, while her later work has increasingly explored abstraction, gesture, repetition, and the physical possibilities of paint. Ackermann’s practice is characterized by an ongoing tension between figuration and abstraction, control and spontaneity, and the intimate and monumental. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The exhibition centers on a seminal, once-performed multimedia project, first realised in 1996. Vivre sa Vie was conceived as a live puppet performance engaging underground music, experimental cinema, and fashion, in collaboration with key figures of the 1990s Downtown New York scene.

Archival footage of the original 1996 performance is part of an installation in the round. The puppets are framed and mounted in ways that reveal both front and reverse, inviting viewers to look behind the scene and into the mechanics of animation.

A new work completes the exhibition. Ackermann developed a wall-based piece that was three-dimensionally scanned and sculpted from a two-dimensional collage.