Ellen Gallagher

Deluxe

18 March - 13 May 2006

Zürich

Ellen Gallagher’s art explores issues of race, identity and transformation. Renowned for her reworking of popular black imagery, Gallagher draws on postwar printed, film and musical culture. She makes repeated reference to the traditions of blackface and minstrelsy, as well as to specific performers such as vaudeville star Bert Williams and jazz musician Sun Ra. Pages from mid-century black photomagazines such as Ebony, Our World and Sepia - all dominated by advertisements for Afro hairstyles, wigs and skin products aimed at the African-American woman - are frequent sources in her investigation of the anxieties and tensions that surrounded black identity during that era. Historically specific cultural references are merged with Gallagher’s own personal biography as a black Irish American woman. Her imagery combines densely patterned surfaces in grid format with intricate biomorphic forms. On closer inspection, these are revealed to be accumulations of lips and eyes, signs drawn from the historical caricatures of the black body. Gallagher borrows these signs and reanimates them using a meticulous process of repetition and revision. The resulting works offer a new and poetic mode of representation.

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Selected images

DeLuxe

2004

Corns

2006

Installation views

About the Artist

Ellen Gallagher

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Ellen Gallagher lives and works between Rotterdam, Netherlands and New York. Gallagher builds multi-layered paintings that pivot between the natural world, mythology and history. Her painting process involves undoing and reforming trains of thought often over long periods of time and across linked bodies of...

Current Exhibitions