Ellen Gallagher

Gagosian is pleased to announce Ellen Gallagher: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, on view through May 23 at the rue de Ponthieu gallery. The exhibition features a cycle of three large-scale paintings titled Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish that Gallagher produced between 2023 and 2026. Among these is a work featured in Gallagher’s exhibition All of No Man’s Land Is Ours at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2023–24).

Built upon canvas-mounted sheets of ruled, gridded paper that are stained in a vibrant pink hue, then layered with brilliantly colored, thickly impastoed pigment and incised palladium leaf, each of the Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish paintings employs a material abundance from which Gallagher’s playful meditations emerge. She takes a sculptural approach to her process, often working paintings from multiple positions. Exploding their compositional grids into groupings of vibrant lines and biomorphic shapes, she melds Post-Minimalist abstraction with imagined ocean-floor topographies and phantasmal worlds.

Gallagher has long been fascinated by the ocean. Her 2010 film installation Osedax, a collaboration with Edgar Cleijne, opens with a shipwreck off the coast of Rhode Island, interspersing animated imagery of a whale fall—the descent of a whale carcass to the abyssal depths of the ocean floor—within a radiant network of sea flora and fauna.