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Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Ellen Gallagher, her first solo exhibition in New York since 1998.
Gallagher has continued to develop a universe of evolving sign systems. The tongues, eyes, wigs, and lips that constitute her vocabulary, mutate and morph into waves, islands, volcanoes, and subatomic particles. Through the repetition and revision of this limited class of signs, meanings are digested and transformed. The densely energetic surfaces range from the glossy black enamel of bling bling, through the pacific expanse of blue in Purgatorium. These works manifest inclusive and reflective models of darkness.
The sedimentary, almost geologic paintings reveal themselves through an alchemy of fugitive materials. Penmanship paper that will shift and change organically over time, is held captive within an archival gel. Rubber forms that multiply and writhe are encased in enamel. The response and refusal that these characters have to captivity create a tension that sends shocks of rhythm and tempo through these monumental pictures. Incisions of the skin reveal and obscure, scars and scabs coagulate at these cutaneous fissures. The marks are built into a multiperspective holographic space. Horizons and vanishing points disappear and reappear like the Cheshire cat, as bird's eye and profile flash in the Polar Sea.
A fully illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibition.
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Nina Simone, Our National Treasure
Text by Salamishah Tillet.
Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019
The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019
The Spring 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Red Pot with Lute Player #2 by Jonas Wood on its cover.
Below the Surface
Ellen Gallagher in conversation with Adrienne Edwards.
Alone on the Infinite Sea: Ellen Gallagher’s Lips Sink
Philip Hoare, author of The Whale and The Sea Inside, creates a narrative about Ellen Gallagher’s newest lithograph, Lips Sink.