Ellen Gallagher

The symbolic for me is about carrying and the potential to carry—it’s like magic. So a character like a jellyfish can be made up of several different bodies, can exist at different times—can be a character that’s symbolic.
—Ellen Gallagher

Gagosian is pleased to present Ellen Gallagher’s first solo exhibition in Paris.

Through processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction, 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.

In the intricately tessellated Ecstatic Draught of Fishes (2019), Gallagher subverts an art historical lineage that begins with The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1618–19)—Peter Paul Rubens’s depiction of one of Christ’s miracles—which later served as compositional inspiration for Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819), showing the gruesome aftermath of a shipwreck off the coast of present-day Mauritania. Géricault’s painting was one of the sources for Slave Ship (1840), the horizonless scene in which J. M. W. Turner confronts the barbaric practice of throwing slaves overboard to lessen a vessel’s weight during a storm. These three paintings seem to have been overlaid and atomized in Gallagher’s intense and delicate work, addressing the relationship between the mercurial sea and intertwined histories of colonialism, slavery, and belief. Myriad spots resembling eyes form a shimmering, amoebic cloud on a background of penmanship paper, while a caryatid headrest from the Congo—another African country brutally colonized by Europeans—acts as a sort of visual anchor.