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Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher, Odalisque, 2005 Gelatin silver print with watercolor and gold leaf, 15 ¼ × 14 ¼ inches framed (38.7 × 36.2 cm), edition of 15

Ellen Gallagher, Odalisque, 2005

Gelatin silver print with watercolor and gold leaf, 15 ¼ × 14 ¼ inches framed (38.7 × 36.2 cm), edition of 15

Installation view, Ellen Gallagher: AxME, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2014 Artwork © Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Wilfried Petzi

Installation view, Ellen Gallagher: AxME, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2014

Artwork © Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Wilfried Petzi

Edgar Cleijne & Ellen Gallagher, Osedax, 2010

Edgar Cleijne & Ellen Gallagher, Osedax, 2010

Ellen Gallagher, Bird in Hand, 2006 Oil, pencil, gold, plasticine, gold leaf, and paper on canvas, 93 ¾ × 120 ⅞ inches (238 × 307 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Bird in Hand, 2006

Oil, pencil, gold, plasticine, gold leaf, and paper on canvas, 93 ¾ × 120 ⅞ inches (238 × 307 cm)

Installation view of works by Ellen Gallagher, La Triennale—Intense Proximité, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012 Artwork © Ellen Gallagher

Installation view of works by Ellen Gallagher, La Triennale—Intense Proximité, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012

Artwork © Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher, Greasy, 2011 Ink, oil, graphite, and printed paper on canvas, 79 ½ × 74 inches (202 × 188 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Greasy, 2011

Ink, oil, graphite, and printed paper on canvas, 79 ½ × 74 inches (202 × 188 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity, 2008 Ink, graphite, oil, varnish, and cut paper on canvas, 79 ½ × 74 inches (202 × 188 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity, 2008

Ink, graphite, oil, varnish, and cut paper on canvas, 79 ½ × 74 inches (202 × 188 cm)

Installation view, Ellen Gallagher: eXelento, Gagosian, West 24th Street, New York, 2004 Artwork © Ellen Gallagher

Installation view, Ellen Gallagher: eXelento, Gagosian, West 24th Street, New York, 2004

Artwork © Ellen Gallagher

Installation view, Ellen Gallagher: eXelento, Gagosian, West 24th Street, New York, 2004 Artwork © Ellen Gallagher

Installation view, Ellen Gallagher: eXelento, Gagosian, West 24th Street, New York, 2004

Artwork © Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic series, 2001 Ink, oil, pencil, and cut paper on paper, 22 ¼ × 30 inches (56.5 × 76.2 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic series, 2001

Ink, oil, pencil, and cut paper on paper, 22 ¼ × 30 inches (56.5 × 76.2 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, They could still serve, 2001 Pigment, paper, and glue on linen, 120 × 96 inches (304.8 × 243.8 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, They could still serve, 2001

Pigment, paper, and glue on linen, 120 × 96 inches (304.8 × 243.8 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Blubber, 2000 Ink, pencil, and paper on linen, 120 × 192 inches (304.8 × 487.7 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Blubber, 2000

Ink, pencil, and paper on linen, 120 × 192 inches (304.8 × 487.7 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Blubber, 2000 (detail) Ink, pencil, and paper on linen, 120 × 192 inches (304.8 × 487.7 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Blubber, 2000 (detail)

Ink, pencil, and paper on linen, 120 × 192 inches (304.8 × 487.7 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Blubber, 2000 (detail) Ink, pencil, and paper on linen, 120 × 192 inches (304.8 × 487.7 cm)

Ellen Gallagher, Blubber, 2000 (detail)

Ink, pencil, and paper on linen, 120 × 192 inches (304.8 × 487.7 cm)

About

What is crucial to my making of a language and a cosmology of signs is the type of repetition that is central to a lot of the music I am listening to right now. . . . I start off with a limited class of signs and, like stacking in music, I chop and revisit the changes to build structure.
—Ellen Gallagher

Through processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction, Ellen Gallagher has invented a densely saturated visual language in which overlapping patterns, motifs, and materials pulse with life. By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, she recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy—unsettling designations of race and nation, art and artifact, and allowing the familiar and the arcane to converge.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Gallagher attended Oberlin College, Ohio; artist Michael Skop’s private art school Studio 70; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (graduating in 1992 and receiving a traveling scholar award in 1993); and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1993). Her interests in these years spanned across disciplines and time periods, including oceanography, microscopic life, popular media, the poetics of Black vernacular language, and the formal geometries of postwar abstraction. In her first major body of work, made in the mid-1990s, Gallagher applied penmanship paper to canvas in uneven grids, filling the pages with small repeated pairs of stylized lips that she both drew and printed in blue ink. These works thus hinged the aesthetics of 1960s Minimalism to racist minstrelsy and blackface physiognomy. Other biomorphic forms (eyes, tongues, and hair) appear in abstract clusters throughout her oeuvre.

In 1998 Gallagher produced a small group of black monochromatic paintings as a direct response to the critical interpretations of her previous works. Starting again with squares of paper on canvas, she added more geometric shapes, creating a textured terrain that she built up with cut rubber. She further inscribed and collaged aleatory motifs from mid-century American race magazines and other sources, then painted the canvas in layers of black enamel. With this thick, reflective surface, Gallagher suggests that the psychosis of race relations is embedded in the history of Western abstraction.

Gallagher was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art in 2000 and began her ongoing Watery Ecstatic (2001–) series the following year. In Watery Ecstatic, she invents complex biomorphic forms that she relates to the mythical Drexciya, an undersea kingdom populated by the women and children who were the tragic casualties of the transatlantic slave trade. Cutting into thick paper in her own version of scrimshaw—the practice of carving whale bones—Gallagher invests the afterlives of the Middle Passage with a sense of material control, her intense focus giving rise to new peripheries. Drexciya is featured again in Gallagher’s film installation Murmur (2003–04), made in collaboration with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne. Combining celluloid film with computer animation, Gallagher and Cleijne developed an aesthetic that emerges from the intersection of archival sources, fiction, and memory.

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Ellen Gallagher

Photo: Philippe Vogelenzang

Fairs, Events & Announcements

Sarah Sze, Spell, 2023 © Sarah Sze

Auction

Nina Simone Childhood Home
Benefit Auction

May 12–22, 2023

This online auction is part of a multifaceted fundraiser to benefit the Nina Simone Childhood Home Preservation Project. Spearheaded by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the project aims to fully restore and maintain the birthplace of musical icon and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Cocurated by artist Adam Pendleton and the tennis champion, entrepreneur, and arts patron Venus Williams, the auction—hosted by Sotheby’s—features work by international artists, including Ellen GallagherSarah SzeMary Weatherford, and Stanley Whitney.

Sarah Sze, Spell, 2023 © Sarah Sze

Left: Michael Armitage. Photo: George Darrell © White Cube. Middle: Manthia Diawara. Right: Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Philippe Vogelenzang

In Conversation

Michael Armitage, Manthia Diawara, Ellen Gallagher
Moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Friday, June 17, 2022, 5pm
Hall 1 Auditorium, Messeplatz, Basel
artbasel.com

Conceived and moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Art Basel Conversations: Artists’ Influencers series brings together artists with individuals who have had a significant effect on their practices. For this program, artists Michael Armitage and Ellen Gallagher and writer and filmmaker Manthia Diawara meet to consider the development of artistic kinships. The event is free to attend in person or online at facebook.com.

Left: Michael Armitage. Photo: George Darrell © White Cube. Middle: Manthia Diawara. Right: Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Philippe Vogelenzang

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, Osedax, 2010 (still) © Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher

Visit

Dhaka Art Summit

February 7–15, 2020
Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka
www.dhakaartsummit.org

William Forsythe and Ellen Gallagher are participating in Dhaka Art Summit 2020: Seismic Movements. Over nine days, five hundred artists, scholars, curators, and thinkers will join in panel discussions, performances, and symposia addressing the theme: “What is a movement and how do we ignite one beyond the confines of an art exhibition?” The event is free and open to the public. 

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, Osedax, 2010 (still) © Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher

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Museum Exhibitions

Ellen Gallagher, Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop, 2002 © Ellen Gallagher

On View

Going Dark
The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility

Through April 7, 2024
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
www.guggenheim.org

Going Dark presents works of art that feature partially obscured or hidden figures, thus positioning them at the “edge of visibility”—a formal strategy that the participating artists use to explore tensions in contemporary society. Occupying the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda, the exhibition includes more than a hundred works by twenty-eight artists, the majority of whom are Black and more than half of whom are women. Work by Ellen Gallagher and Titus Kaphar is included.

Ellen Gallagher, Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop, 2002 © Ellen Gallagher

Installation view, Ellen Gallagher: All of No Man’s Land Is Ours, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, December 2, 2023–March 10, 2024. Artwork © Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Peter Tijhuis

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Ellen Gallagher
All of No Man’s Land Is Ours

December 2, 2023–March 10, 2024
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
www.stedelijk.nl

All of No Man’s Land Is Ours is Ellen Gallagher’s first solo exhibition in Amsterdam. The installation reflects the diversity of the artist’s practice in which painting, cut and carved rubber, crumpled notebook papers, and metal beaten to an airy thinness intertwine in a dynamic relationship.

Installation view, Ellen Gallagher: All of No Man’s Land Is Ours, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, December 2, 2023–March 10, 2024. Artwork © Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Peter Tijhuis

Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2021 © Ellen Gallagher

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Ellen Gallagher in
In the Black Fantastic

November 19, 2022–April 10, 2023
Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands
www.kunsthal.nl

In the Black Fantastic explores the work of eleven contemporary artists from the African diaspora who draw on science fiction, myth, and Afrofuturism to question our knowledge of the world. In this exhibition, which includes painting, photography, video, sculpture, and mixed-media installations, fantasy becomes a zone of creative and cultural liberation and a means of addressing racism and social injustice by conjuring new ways of being in the world. This exhibition has traveled from the Hayward Gallery in London. Work by Ellen Gallagher is included.

Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2021 © Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2007 © Ellen Gallagher

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Ellen Gallagher in
Les Portes du Possible: Art & Science-Fiction

November 5, 2022–April 10, 2023
Centre Pompidou-Metz, France
www.centrepompidou-metz.fr

This exhibition, whose title translates to A Gateway to Possible Worlds: Art & Science Fiction, brings together more than two hundred works from the late 1960s to the present day. Art and science fiction whisk visitors away to a sci-fi realm that spotlights the bonds between imaginary worlds and reality with the help of artists, authors, architects, and film directors. Both fields build on the demands for twenty-first-century utopias to spark debate, inspiration, and hope. Work by Ellen Gallagher is included.

Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2007 © Ellen Gallagher

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Press

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