| Dates: | born 1965
| | Biography: | Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence,
Rhode Island, USA in 1965, and studied
at Oberlin College and at the School of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Using different techniques from painting
to 16mm films, Ellen Gallagher opens up
windows on to a universe in which
narratives of history and identity are
at once pulled apart and re-imagined.
Gallagher's work is affected through its
subtle straddling of the aesthetic,
social and political, in the collision
of historical realism with science
fiction, or the austere structures of
minimalism with highly evocative
staccato rhythms. The cyborg figures
that have emerged from science fiction
writing have long presented Gallagher
with an inspiration for rethinking
prosthetically transformed
subjectivities. Gallagher's use of
pattern and texture in works like DeLuxe
and Host, creates a spatiality in which
a sense of the interiority of the body
is infinitely expanded and becomes a
means of remembering the past. The
abstract spaces opened up in Gallagher’s
paintings, prints and drawings create a
sense of time that can be linked to her
16mm films. An early painting Host is a
good example, created on penmanship
paper that darkens over a period of
time. It is also a readymade abstraction
drawn and painted with disembodied
signs
that invites the spacing of language as
a means to activate the signs as
characters. This compositional
arrangement suggests a reading from up
close and the meticulous making over
time determines their interiority
through a precise spacing of form.
Gallagher is both inside the work and
hovering over it, improvising a
shimmering playful web that seems to
belie the labour of its making.
As Gallagher's process of painting has
evolved, incorporating more complex
combinations of collaged and painted
elements, her works have become more
resistant to decoding. Her painting
IGBT, for example, takes the internal
form of a circuit board as the template
for a geometric patterning against which
two silhouettes are inlaid and appear to
be both inside the structure and
floating away from it. Within this
double portrait Gallagher references
archaic portraiture of two freedom
fighters encased within a circuit board
to invoke a post human future anterior.
Their confidence and postural semantics,
less bravado than evocative of an
intimacy and familiarity of form that
has become oblique.
Recent works continue Gallagher's
interest in making visible the expansive
realms of interiority we have become
familiar with in scientific imagery but
has yet to be represented as a
contemplative space of reflection.
Selected recent solo exhibitions
include, An Experiment of Unusual
Opportunity, South London Gallery
(2009); Coral Cities, Tate Liverpool and
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (2007); Salt
Eaters, Hauser & Wirth, London (2006);
DeLuxe, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2006);
Ellen Gallagher: Ichthyosaurus, Freud
Museum, London (2005); Ellen Gallagher:
Murmur and DeLuxe, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Miami (2005);
DeLuxe,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York
(2005); Orbus, Fruitmarket Gallery,
Edinburgh (2004); Ellen Gallagher –
eXelento, Galerie im Taxispalais,
Innsbruck/AT and Gagosian Gallery, New
York (2004).
Selected recent group exhibitions
include Moby Dick, CCA Wattis Institute
for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
(upcoming 2009); Paper: Pressed,
Stained, Slashed, Folded, Museum of
Modern Art, New York (2009); Artist
Rooms, National Galleries of Scotland,
Edinburgh (2009); Medals of Dishonour,
The British Museum, London (2009); For
What You are About to Receive,
Gagosian
Gallery / Red October Chocolate Factory,
Moscow (2008); Paper Trail II: Passing
Through Clouds, Rose Art Museum,
Waltham
MA (2008); Eclipse. Art in a Dark Age,
Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008);
Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to
Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York
(2007); Passages From History, Tate
Modern, London (2007); Comic
Abstraction, Museum of Modern Art, New
York (2007); The Secret Theory of
Drawing, The Drawing Room, London and
The Model Arts Gallery & Niland Gallery,
Sligo (2006); Black Alphabet –
ConTEXTS
of Contemporary African-American Art,
Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki,
Warsaw
(2006); Heart of Darkness, Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis, USA (2006).
Ellen Gallagher lives and works in New
York and Rotterdam, Netherlands. She
received the American Academy Award
in
Art in 2000, the Joan Mitchell
Fellowship in 1997 and the 1996
MacDowell Colony Award.
| | | Source: | New Contemporaries website | | | Date of source: | accessed 2009 |
|
| | Gender: | female | | Type: | person |
| |
