In 1998 Gallagher produced a small group of black monochromatic paintings as a direct response to the critical interpretations of her previous works. Other biomorphic forms (eyes, tongues, and hair) appear in abstract clusters throughout her oeuvre. These works thus hinged the aesthetics of 1960s Minimalism to racist minstrelsy and blackface physiognomy. 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. 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. 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.īorn 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). 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. I start off with a limited class of signs and, like stacking in music, I chop and revisit the changes to build structure. 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.
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