The Brooklyn Rail's editor Phong H. Bui has sat down with Rita Ackermann on the occasion of the painter's current New York exhibition, The Chemical Alphabet, at Hauser & Wirth's 134 Wooster Street space, running 9 September to 17 October 2026. The extended conversation ranges across more than thirty years of the Hungarian-born artist's restlessly shifting practice. Ackermann arrived in New York from Budapest in 1992. She lasted six months at the New York Studio School before walking away, moving into a small East Village apartment and taking waitressing jobs to get by. The downtown scene she landed in — jazz clubs, subcultural cinema, the last wild years of 42nd Street — became her real education, and she absorbed the city's relentless pace like, in her words, a dry sponge. Her earliest paintings drew adolescent girls in states of mess and mischief, works like Get a Job (1993), and her first solo show at Andrea Rosen in 1994 gave that imagery a public debut. In conversation she describes herself as "rooted in rootlessness" — the conviction that culture, rather than any country, is home for someone who left one city without ever fully landing in another. That dissonance, she argues, is what keeps her painting moving. The pair also discuss her detours away from painting, including years spent making music, and her resistance to building a protective language around her work. The through-line, as the interview frames it, is an artist who has lived several different lives in public — and let each one leave its mark on the canvas.