Ellen Gallagher — AxME
EXHIBITION
Till 13.07.14
Ellen Gallagher (born 1965) brings together imagery from myth, nature, art and social history to create complex works in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, and film.
Through a painstaking process of obscuring and layering she transforms imagery from an eclectic range of literature, music, or advertising until only traces of them are left visible through a veil of inky smudges, punctures, stains and abrasions to suggest a strange and unsettling imaginary world.
In 1986 Ellen Gallagher spent a semester aboard an oceanographic research vessel examining the migratory patterns of pteropods – microscopic wing-footed snails, and drawing them. In a series of watercolours she recalls these studies of natural history (“Coral Cities”, 2007). The people of ‘Drexciya’ represent the main inhabitants of this series. Drexciya is a mythic black Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean founded by pregnant African women who leapt or were thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage and gave birth to offspring capable of breathing underwater. Gallgher populates her canvases with women protected by Afro wigs made of vibrant sea creatures and marine flora; women with flowing coral hairs; and jellyfish-like figures with African faces. For Gallagher, the overboard, drowned slaves are carriers of ideas of regeneration and transhistorical nation. As an Exodus narrative, Gallagher’s watercolours are not simply about escape but about the New Land, new beginnings, new identities formed in the context of emancipation.
Ellen Gallagher took the New York art world by storm in the early 1990s with a series of beautifully balanced, deceptively minimalist paintings such as “Oh! Susanna” (1993), “Oogaboogah”, and “Pinocchio Theory” (both 1994). In a series of work she used advertisements for wigs and other commodities as well as feature articles from black-oriented magazines like Ebony, Our World, Black Stars, etc. One of her most intriguing works consists of a grid of twenty female wig models of various skin shades set against a vast white background. The wigs are meticulously cut into elaborate shapes and float on paper as if embossed.
Beginning with “Preserve” (2001), the works show accumulations of eyes, lips and spores constructed with plasticine and paint and boxed in alongside the advertisements. The ads also became the basis for a series of five monumenal works comprising 396 portraits laid out on a grid, among them “Pomp-Bang” (2003), referred to by Ellen Gallagher as the ‘yellow paintings’. The grid allows for non-linear, random reading, inviting the viewer to imagine intersecting narratives.
This survey exhibition takes an overview of Gallagher’s practice, exploring the themes which have emerged and recurred from her seminal early canvases, to her ‘wigmap’ grid collages, through to recent film installations and new bodies of work.
Organized by Tate Modern in association with Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere and Haus der Kunst, Munich. With thanks to Gagosian Gallery and Hauser & Wirth for their support towards the Ellen Gallagher: AxME international tour.
We thank Bayerische Hausbau GmbH & Co.KG for their generous support as principle sponsor of the exhibition at Haus der Kunst.
Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstraße 1
80538 Munich
Germany
+49 89 21127 113
+49 89 21127 157 Fax
mail (at) hausderkunst.de
Okwui Enwezor in Frieze on Ellen Gallagher
IN THE PRESS
IN 1996 FOR AN ARTICLE IN “FRIEZE” MAGAZINE, OKWUI Enwezor wrote about Ellen Gallagher’s early work. In the early 1990s, the African American artist gained renown in the New York art scene for presenting works that initially seemed minimalist but, upon closer inspection, contained political aspects.
“Take a painting like Totentanz (1995), marked out by chalky horizontal blocks of glued-down paper that resemble a brick wall, into which she has packed notions of femininity and race by incising a ghostly, looming shape that mimics a head, the curve of a woman’s body and an urn or trophy, and you will understand why she’s raised such a ruckus since appearing in the last Whitney Biennial.
Because innocence and joy are not appealing ingredients in the art world, and because Gallagher is an African-American woman who makes gorgeous abstract works of deceptively calm, pleasurable sea surfaces, one gets nervous. Beneath this though, lies a more discordant purpose that purportedly carries the kind of political content (read: race) and outward signs of otherness that many feel lacking in painting today.”
Okwui Enwezor, Frieze, 1996
Art in Review — Review in New York Times on Ellen Gallagher
IN THE PRESS
In his review of artist Ellen Gallagher’s work “DeLuxe”, Holland Cotter commented in the New York Times:
“Some people have trouble with Ellen Gallagher’s work. Is it the combination of prettiness and politics that make it suspect? …
The 60 … prints from the portfolio titled ”DeLuxe,” produced by Two Palms Press, are even more intensely tactile, which focuses attention right off on their formal complexity, drawing as they do on a dozen different techniques from straightforward etching, to laser-cutting and tattoo-machine engraving. Only a little later do you realize that the themes of race and gender embedded in the earlier work are here pulled right to the surface …
Most of the prints are based on advertisements for hair-styling, skin-lightening and feminine hygiene, all found in 1950’s and 60’s issues of African-American magazines like Ebony and Sepia, in the days before Black Power. Like most advertising, they play the personal transformation card, telling you how you can look better, act better, smell better, be better, which really means not be offensive, which, naturally, you are.
In Ms. Gallagher hands, these ideals of beauty turn grotesque, but with a kind of celebratory élan. White face and black face are interchangeable. Eyes are gouged out or pop out. Black hair turns into blond hair that sits on the prints’ surfaces like cake icing or chewing gum. Commerce is about consumption? O.K., eat this. It’s plastic? Eat it anyway …
I thought of Ms. Gallagher’s early work as ”subversive.” What you would call these [prints] … I honestly don’t know. But with a virtuosic flash they sure are dissing something, and spreading the acid in many directions.”
Art in Review; Ellen Gallagher
by Holland Cotter, New York Times, April 1, 2005