Under Pressure from 2006 to 2007

A 15 x 40 cm Nieves zine whose format follows the work it reproduces: the collage-paintings Rita Ackermann built between two vertical sheets of Plexiglas across 2006 and 2007, the body of work that carried her into the Whitney Biennial.

Thirty-six pages, colour offset, no text. Ackermann worked almost exclusively in collage over those two years, compressing magazine and newspaper cut-outs, ballpoint drawing and paint under Plexiglas panels that stood more than two metres high. The book runs full-bleed installation views against close details of the same pieces. Nieves published it in Zurich in 2008 and Printed Matter launched it in New York that November, the year Ackermann appeared in the Whitney Biennial and Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times that she is "equally at home with scissors or ballpoint pen."

Ackermann was born in Budapest in 1968 and studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts from 1989 to 1992, moving to New York and continuing at the New York Studio School. The Plexiglas collages sit between the drawn adolescent figures of her 1990s paintings and the later Chalkboard and Mama series. She is represented by Hauser & Wirth. The library also holds her Skira Rizzoli monograph and Chapter 5, the 2026 Nieves book made with Andro Wekua.