News / Ellen Gallagher

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Going Dark
The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility

October 20, 2023–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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Whitney Biennial 2022
Quiet as It’s Kept

April 6–October 16, 2022
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org

The Whitney Biennial was established in 1932 by the museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, to chart developments in art in the United States. The 2022 Biennial presents dynamic selections that take different forms over the course of the exhibition: artworks—even walls—change, and performance animates the galleries and objects. With an intergenerational and interdisciplinary roster of sixty-three artists and collectives at all points in their careers, many of whom work with an interdisciplinary perspective, the Biennial surveys and presents the art and ideas of our time. Work by Harold Ancart, Ellen Gallagher, Cy Gavin, and Rick Lowe is included.

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Ellen Gallagher in
In the Black Fantastic

June 29–September 18, 2022
Hayward Gallery, London
www.southbankcentre.co.uk

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. Work by Ellen Gallagher is included.

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Ellen Gallagher with Edgar Cleijne
A Law. . . A Blueprint. . . A Scale

April 14–September 11, 2022
Centro Botín, Santander, Spain
www.centrobotin.org

Spanning two decades of Ellen Gallagher’s career, A Law. . . A Blueprint. . . A Scale includes paintings, works on paper, and three film installations created in collaboration with Edgar Cleijne. The exhibition invites visitors to submerge themselves under the ocean’s skin through an immersive itinerary that explores issues of race, identity, and transformation, with reference to themes such as Modernist abstraction and marine biology.

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Ellen Gallagher in
To Be Like Water

December 17, 2021–May 22, 2022
TENT Rotterdam, Netherlands
www.tentrotterdam.nl

To Be Like Water explores and expands on the meaning of code-switching—a term used in linguistics to denote the practice of alternating between multiple languages in conversation—which now also commonly refers to adjusting one’s behaviors to optimize the comfort of others. The exhibition aims to examine and complicate the notion of identity, and consider code-switching as a manifestation of a fluid multiplicity that operates within vectors of power. Work by Ellen Gallagher is included.

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Icons

May 6–November 14, 2021
Boghossian Foundation, Brussels
www.villaempain.com

From early European and Middle Eastern artifacts to modern and contemporary works, icons have inspired many believers, as well as artists, throughout the ages. This exhibition explores how spiritual dimensions have been incorporated into artworks from antiquity to the present day. Work by Michael Craig-Martin, Ellen Gallagher, Douglas Gordon, Duane Hanson, Titus Kaphar, and Andy Warhol is included.

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Invisible Sun

May 26–October 3, 2021
The Broad, Los Angeles
www.thebroad.org

Developed amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the groundswell of demands for social justice and racial equity, Invisible Sun features artworks that resonate with this unprecedented period of rupture and unrest. The works on view speak to profound transitions, both personal and global—including the AIDS crisis, gender- and race-based violence, unchecked capitalism, and colonialism’s aftermath—and form an appeal for healing. Work by Ellen Gallagher and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

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Ellen Gallagher in
Sonsbeek20→24: Force Times Distance

July 2–August 29, 2021
Various locations in Arnhem, Netherlands
www.sonsbeek20-24.org

The twelfth edition of the Sonsbeek exhibition, Sonsbeek20→24: Force Times Distance, centers on the topic of labor and its sonic ecologies. Examining labor relations through sound, oral stories, and music, it asks questions about how value is produced, what is seen, and who is heard. The exhibition includes more than 250 contributions installed in more than a dozen different locations across Arnhem, Netherlands, including airplane hangers, churches, and barbershops, expanding concepts of public space and public art. Work by Ellen Gallagher is included.

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Ellen Gallagher in
Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama

September 24, 2019–July 18, 2021
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
www.icaboston.org

This exhibition provides visitors with a deeper understanding of how the immersive environment of Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING (2013) embodies the artist’s long-standing exploration of accumulation, repetition, luminescence, life and death, and happenings. Works featuring Kusama’s obsessive repetition of symbols, patterns, and forms are paired with works by contemporaries as well as those by current practitioners such as Ellen Gallagher.