Ellen Gallagher

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Ellen Gallagher, her first solo exhibition in New York since 1998.

Gallagher has continued to develop a universe of evolving sign systems. The tongues, eyes, wigs, and lips that constitute her vocabulary, mutate and morph into waves, islands, volcanoes, and subatomic particles. Through the repetition and revision of this limited class of signs, meanings are digested and transformed. The densely energetic surfaces range from the glossy black enamel of bling bling, through the pacific expanse of blue in Purgatorium. These works manifest inclusive and reflective models of darkness.

The sedimentary, almost geologic paintings reveal themselves through an alchemy of fugitive materials. Penmanship paper that will shift and change organically over time, is held captive within an archival gel. Rubber forms that multiply and writhe are encased in enamel. The response and refusal that these characters have to captivity create a tension that sends shocks of rhythm and tempo through these monumental pictures. Incisions of the skin reveal and obscure, scars and scabs coagulate at these cutaneous fissures. The marks are built into a multiperspective holographic space. Horizons and vanishing points disappear and reappear like the Cheshire cat, as bird's eye and profile flash in the Polar Sea.

A fully illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibition.