Ellen Gallagher was born
in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965, and lives and works in New
York and Rotterdam, Holland. She attended Oberlin College
and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Repetition
and
revision are central to Gallagher’s treatment of advertisements
that she appropriates from popular magazines like “Ebony,”
“Our World,”
and “Sepia” and uses in works
like “eXelento” (2004)
and “DeLuxe” (2004-05).
Initially, Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because
of their grid-like structure. Later she realized that it was the
accompanying language that attracted her, and she began to bring
these ‘narratives’ into her paintings—making
them function through the characters of the advertisements as a
kind of chart of lost worlds. Although the work has often been
interpreted strictly as an examination of race, Gallagher also
suggests a more formal reading with respect to materials, processes,
and insistences. From afar, the work appears abstract and minimal.
Upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues,
and lips of minstrel caricatures multiply in detail. Gallagher
has been influenced by the sublime aesthetics of Agnes Martin’s
paintings as well the subtle shifts and repetitions of Gertrude
Stein’s writing. In her earlier works, Gallagher glued pages
of penmanship paper onto stretched canvas and then drew and painted
on it. In “Watery Ecstatic” (2002-04),
she literally carved images into thick watercolor paper in her
own version of scrimshaw, from
which emerge images of the sea creatures from Drexciya, a mythical
underwater Black Atlantis. Gallagher received the American Academy
Award in Art and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Solo exhibitions
include the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary
Art, North Miami; St. Louis Art Museum; Des Moines Art Center;
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and ICA Boston.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Gagosian Gallery, New York | Hauser & Wirth, London
Ellen Gallagher on the Art21 blog |
