About
What is crucial to my making of a language and a cosmology of signs is the type of repetition that is central to a lot of the music I am listening to right now. . . . I start off with a limited class of signs and, like stacking in music, I chop and revisit the changes to build structure.
—Ellen Gallagher
Through processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction, Ellen Gallagher has invented a densely saturated visual language in which overlapping patterns, motifs, and materials pulse with life. By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, she recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy—unsettling designations of race and nation, art and artifact, and allowing the familiar and the arcane to converge.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Gallagher attended Oberlin College, Ohio; artist Michael Skop’s private art school Studio 70; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (graduating in 1992 and receiving a traveling scholar award in 1993); and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1993). Her interests in these years spanned across disciplines and time periods, including oceanography, microscopic life, popular media, the poetics of Black vernacular language, and the formal geometries of postwar abstraction. In her first major body of work, made in the mid-1990s, Gallagher applied penmanship paper to canvas in uneven grids, filling the pages with small repeated pairs of stylized lips that she both drew and printed in blue ink. These works thus hinged the aesthetics of 1960s Minimalism to racist minstrelsy and blackface physiognomy. Other biomorphic forms (eyes, tongues, and hair) appear in abstract clusters throughout her oeuvre.
In 1998 Gallagher produced a small group of black monochromatic paintings as a direct response to the critical interpretations of her previous works. Starting again with squares of paper on canvas, she added more geometric shapes, creating a textured terrain that she built up with cut rubber. She further inscribed and collaged aleatory motifs from mid-century American race magazines and other sources, then painted the canvas in layers of black enamel. With this thick, reflective surface, Gallagher suggests that the psychosis of race relations is embedded in the history of Western abstraction.
Gallagher was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art in 2000 and began her ongoing Watery Ecstatic (2001–) series the following year. In Watery Ecstatic, she invents complex biomorphic forms that she relates to the mythical Drexciya, an undersea kingdom populated by the women and children who were the tragic casualties of the transatlantic slave trade. Cutting into thick paper in her own version of scrimshaw—the practice of carving whale bones—Gallagher invests the afterlives of the Middle Passage with a sense of material control, her intense focus giving rise to new peripheries. Drexciya is featured again in Gallagher’s film installation Murmur (2003–04), made in collaboration with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne. Combining celluloid film with computer animation, Gallagher and Cleijne developed an aesthetic that emerges from the intersection of archival sources, fiction, and memory.

Photo: Philippe Vogelenzang
#EllenGallagher
Exhibitions

Nina Simone, Our National Treasure
Text by Salamishah Tillet.
Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019
The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019
The Spring 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Red Pot with Lute Player #2 by Jonas Wood on its cover.

Below the Surface
Ellen Gallagher in conversation with Adrienne Edwards.

Alone on the Infinite Sea: Ellen Gallagher’s Lips Sink
Philip Hoare, author of The Whale and The Sea Inside, creates a narrative about Ellen Gallagher’s newest lithograph, Lips Sink.
Fairs, Events & Announcements

Auction
Nina Simone Childhood Home
Benefit Auction
May 12–22, 2023
This online auction is part of a multifaceted fundraiser to benefit the Nina Simone Childhood Home Preservation Project. Spearheaded by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the project aims to fully restore and maintain the birthplace of musical icon and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Cocurated by artist Adam Pendleton and the tennis champion, entrepreneur, and arts patron Venus Williams, the auction—hosted by Sotheby’s—features work by international artists, including Ellen Gallagher, Sarah Sze, Mary Weatherford, and Stanley Whitney.
Sarah Sze, Spell, 2023 © Sarah Sze

In Conversation
Michael Armitage, Manthia Diawara, Ellen Gallagher
Moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Friday, June 17, 2022, 5pm
Hall 1 Auditorium, Messeplatz, Basel
artbasel.com
Conceived and moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Art Basel Conversations: Artists’ Influencers series brings together artists with individuals who have had a significant effect on their practices. For this program, artists Michael Armitage and Ellen Gallagher and writer and filmmaker Manthia Diawara meet to consider the development of artistic kinships. The event is free to attend in person or online at facebook.com.
Left: Michael Armitage. Photo: George Darrell © White Cube. Middle: Manthia Diawara. Right: Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Philippe Vogelenzang

Visit
Dhaka Art Summit
February 7–15, 2020
Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka
www.dhakaartsummit.org
William Forsythe and Ellen Gallagher are participating in Dhaka Art Summit 2020: Seismic Movements. Over nine days, five hundred artists, scholars, curators, and thinkers will join in panel discussions, performances, and symposia addressing the theme: “What is a movement and how do we ignite one beyond the confines of an art exhibition?” The event is free and open to the public.
Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, Osedax, 2010 (still) © Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher
Museum Exhibitions

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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.
Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2021 © Ellen Gallagher

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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.
Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2007 © Ellen Gallagher

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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.
Harold Ancart, The Guiding Light, 2021, installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © Harold Ancart. Photo: Ryan Lowry

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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.
Installation view, In the Black Fantastic, Hayward Gallery, London, June 29–September 18, 2022. Artwork © Ellen Gallagher