Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher is an American artist. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in the permanent collections of many major museums. Her media include painting, works on paper, film and video. Some of her pieces refer to issues of race, and may combine formality with racial stereotypes and depict "ordering principles" society imposes.

Gallagher gained recognition as an artist in 1995. Prior to her Gagosian showing, Gallagher had solo shows at Mary Boone in Soho, New York, and Anthony D'Offay in London. As her first solo show in New York, Gallagher chose Mary Boone's space because of its neutrality, in which she stated, "because there the abstract qualities of my work stand out first".

Gallagher is an abstract painter and multimedia artist creating minimalist work with subject narratives. Gallagher's influences include the paintings of Agnes Martin and the repetitive writings of Gertrude Stein. Some of Gallagher's work involves repetitively modifying advertising found in African American focused publications such as Ebony, Sepia, and Our World, including images from Valmor Products ads, as in her DeLuxe series. Her most famous pieces are her grid-like collages of magazines grouped together into larger pieces. Examples of these are eXelento (2004), Afrylic (2004), and DeLuxe (2005). The series DeLuxe showed multiple creative methods, from photogravure to digital printing. Gallagher used oils to combine different sheets together and add texture. Gallagher pushed the limit between two and three dimensions in her series. She used new technologies to create plates in many layers. Each of these works contains as many as or more than 60 prints employing techniques of photogravure, spit-bite, collage, cutting, scratching, silkscreen, offset lithography and hand-building. Gallagher also glues notebook paper drawings onto her canvas to create textured surfaces.

In her artwork, she combines different traits of three art movements. Two of them mentioned by her are Abstract expressionism and Minimalism., but by observing her use of specific materials like magazines, newspapers, etc. The use of patterns and repetition series as well as the many printing techniques she uses can relate to her work with Pop-art. With stylized allusions to cartoons and childhood toys or via transformed and manipulated advertisements Gallagher's work "seduces the viewer into visceral engagement with images about which we have learned to feel numb.

Even though Gallagher does not describe her artwork as any of these art styles individually, not only her but other art-related individuals and regular audiences describe Gallagher's work as singular and interesting. Very contrasting styles combined to give life to meticulously unique Pop-abstract-minimalist artworksSome of Gallagher's early influences while attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were the Darkroom Collective, a group of poets living and working out of Inman Square in Cambridge, MA and would go on to become the art coordinator of the collective. The Darkroom collective allowed Gallagher to explore her talent and apply her culture as an African-American woman to her work. One of her first exhibits took place at the Dark Room in 1989. Some other influences at the Museum School were Susan Denker, Ann Hamilton, Kiki Smith and Laylah Ali.

Themes related to race are often evident in Gallagher's work, sometimes using pictographs, symbols, codes and repetitions. "Sambo lips" and "bug eyes," references to the Black minstrel shows, are often scattered throughout Gallagher's works. Additionally, Gallagher would use these symbols in her collage pieces, inspired by lined yellow paper schoolchildren use. Certain characters are also used repeatedly, such as the image of the nurse or the "Pegleg" character that sometimes populate her page's iconography. Gallagher made Wiglette from Deluxe 2004 to 2005, which contains a collection of vintage beauty ads from the 1930s to 70s intended for black American women. Through this art piece Ellen Gallagher is once again exploring the intersection of identity, race and culture. When asked about Wiglette in an interview Gallagher said, "The wig ladies are fugitives. Conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the 'race' magazines of the past. But I transformed them-here on the pages that once held them captive." Some of her pieces may explicitly reference the issue of race while also having a more subtle undercurrent related to race. She was inspired by the New Negro movement as well as modernist abstraction. Gallagher also uses found historical images in her work. She combines formality (grid lines, ruled paper) with the racial stereotypes to depict the "ordering principles" society imposes."Blackface minstrel is a ghost story, " Gallagher has noted. "It's about loss; there's a black mask and sublimation...[B]lackface minstrel was the first great American abstraction, even before jazz. It's the literal recording of the African body into American public culture. Disembodied eyes and lips float, hostage, in the electric black of the minstrel stage, distorting the African body into American blackface." As well as using racially charged imagery, Gallagher is known to portray bodies and include elements of poetry and pop culture in her work. She uses golden tones to portray the racial binary in society. Her media includes paintings, works on paper, film and video. She has made innovative use of materials, such as creating a unique variation on scrimshaw by carving images into the surface of thick sheets of watercolor paper and drawing with ink, watercolor and pencil. Her extensive ongoing series begun in 2001 and titled, Watery Ecstatic, consists of paintings, sculptural objects, and animations to depict sea life through Afrofuturist aesthetics. Gallagher creates different sea creatures to symbolize slave ancestors who died during the transatlantic slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean. These works depict sea creatures, of the mythical undersea world of Drexciya, which were the progeny of slaves who had drowned. This mythology had been conceived by a musical duo of that name, from Detroit. Gallagher commented upon the process of creating these pieces: "The way that these drawings are made is my version of scrimshaw, the carving into bone that sailors did when they were out whaling. I imagine them in this overwhelming, scary expanse of sea where this kind of cutting would give a focus, a sense of being in control of something." Some of Gallagher's work would also consist of codes made from cut out letters. In some of her early pieces, she painted and drew on sheets of penmanship paper (ruled paper used for handwriting practice) she had pasted onto canvas. Her choice of penmanship paper is significant, in an interview with Jessica Morgan, she says "the sense of a neutral surface that can accommodate any mark seems an ideal way of communicating freedom," which is described by her as "idiosyncratic" and "inscrutable". As her previous work has been critiqued for being too racially charged, her newer work contains less explicit racial images to challenge viewers.

In 1995, Gallagher's work was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2003. Artist Chuck Close created a 2009 tapestry portrait of Gallagher. Gallagher is represented by Gagosian Gallery (New York) and Hauser & Wirth (London). She is based in the United States (New York City) and the Netherlands (Rotterdam).

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023