Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher (born December 16, 1965)

In Rhode Island, Gallagher attended Moses Brown, an elite, Quaker college preparatory school. At sixteen, Gallagher entered her first year at Oberlin College in Ohio (1982–1984) and studied writing. 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". 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. 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.

Some 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. Some other influences at the Museum School were Susan Denker, Ann Hamilton, Kiki Smith and Laylah Ali. 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 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...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. 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. 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.

Selected exhibitions Ellen Gallagher's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at numerous galleries and institutions including: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston USA, "Watery Ecstatic" (2001)

Publications Murmur. Orbus in collaboration with Edgar Cleijne. Hauser & Wirth London/Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh (ed.) 2005. English, 5 books holding together with magnet, 990 pages. With "Blizzard of White" (2003, 55 min loop, 16 mm).

Collections Gallagher's work is held in many permanent collections including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Goetz Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Studio Museum in Harlem, Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Moderna Museet, Sammlung Goetz and the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Specific works include:

Doll's Eyes, 1992, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA Afro Mountain, 1994, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Tally, 1994, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Untitled, 1995, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA Delirious Hem, 1995, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Host, 1996, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Paper Cup, 1996, Tate Modern, London Teeth Tracks, 1996, The Broad, Los Angeles, CA Untitled, 1996, The Broad, Los Angeles, CA Untitled, 1997, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Untitled, 1998, National Galleries of Scotland Untitled, 1999, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Blubber, 2000, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton NJ They Could Still Serve, 2001, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Bouffant Pride, 2003, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH Water Ecstatic, 2003, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO Duke, 2004, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA DeLuxe, 2004–2005, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA Bird in Hand, 2006, Tate Modern, London, England