ZERO IN: The Image as a Necessary Accident:on Rita Ackermann + Harmony Korine at the Maria Leuff Foundation

Some images arrive with the clarity of a completed gesture; others crash into view like accidents. They hesitate, stutter, get dirty. They don’t reveal themselves; they happen. ZERO IN, the exhibition at the Maria Leuff Foundation that brings together Rita Ackermann’s painting with Harmony Korine’s cinematic sensibility, is not a show in the conventional sense. It’s a sprint through a storm. A sequence of unstable apparitions, filtered through screen printing but driven by an urgency that transcends medium and material.

Eighteen works on paper, plus one solitary painting; not a coherent corpus, but a living body. Vibrant, shaken, electric. The gallery space holds its breath as color shatters, condenses, and dissolves along the walls like a film sequence with erratic frames. Each panel is a frame. Each frame, a risk.

There’s something deeply American, and yet radically out of time, in the pairing of these two artists. Ackermann, with her physical, gestural painting, always on the verge of implosion. Korine, with his poetics of error, discomfort, and the off-screen. But it’s precisely in that ambiguous space between painting and editing, between image and collapse, that ZERO IN emerges. A title that suggests precision, focus, alignment, but leads us elsewhere: into slippage, distortion, the unpredictability of the visual act.

The key lies in the show’s epigraph, a quote from director John Ford: “When it happens, photograph it!” he says, recalling a scene shot during an unexpected thunderstorm. Lightning, thunder, cavalry charging. Unplanned, unscripted. But real. More real than the staging. For Ford, as for Ackermann and Korine, the image happens when something escapes. When control falters and a crack opens up: another kind of time, a raw evidence that can’t be reasoned, only seized.

This “first take” logic, the first shot, the first brushstroke, governs the show. Not out of spontaneism, but out of faith in immediacy as truth. Ackermann paints like hurling a body through space. Korine intervenes like slicing film in the edit, seeking the error, the wound, the double meaning. There’s no fixed form, only collision paths. Screen printing becomes a tool of misalignment, of disruption, of short-circuit. Faces split, blend, disappear. The image is constantly interrupted, and it’s precisely in that rupture that its power is found.

The installation amplifies this dynamic. The works, hung in a tight sequence, build a wall-in-motion, a chromatic wave that surges from deep black to acidic greens, reds, oranges, blues. The space behaves like a film. But a film without plot, without beginning or end. An emotional loop that runs on vibration rather than logic.

And then there’s the isolated painting. Quieter, more restrained. A counter-beat. Perhaps a pause, perhaps the blind spot of the entire operation. It stands as a reminder that behind the collaboration, behind the tension of the duo, there’s still a singularity. A presence. A choice. Or perhaps just a missed intention.

What strikes about ZERO IN is its refusal of the traditional idea of the artwork as a finished object. Everything here is left open, sometimes even unstable. And yet, for that very reason, profoundly alive. There’s a real sense of risk. A radical trust that something, in the disorder, will happen. Not because it was planned, but because it’s inevitable. Or as Ford would say, “That’s just luck.”

But it’s not just luck. It’s a discipline of chance. An art of letting things happen. A choreography of productive failure. Ackermann and Korine don’t try to contain the accident, they listen to it. They turn it into language. And in that openness to instability, the work finally opens to the viewer, not as a message, but as a field. As tension. As possibility.

ZERO IN is, at its core, a manual for unstable images. An invitation to stay in the moment when the scene trembles, when lightning strikes the frame, when something, finally, can no longer be predicted.