Ellen Gallagher (b. 1965) is one of the most acclaimed American artists working today. Her paintings, collages, drawings, sculpture, animation, and film installations, which shift between abstraction and figuration, create dynamic encounters between the historic and the present through commentary about race, racism, and cultural identity. Her works explore the language of modernist painting with symbolic or narrative content, often touching on issues of representation—for example, her 2006 piece Bird in Hand, which forms a central part of this appraisal, is a complex relief built up in layers on canvas through the application of newspaper cuttings, clay, rock crystals, silver paint, and gold leaf, created to evoke the mythical Drexciya or Black Atlantis, an underwater world populated by a marine species descended from drowned slaves.Created in close dialogue with the artist, this book catalogues a unique opportunity to present a selective yet coherent overview of Gallagher’s practice, bringing together significant works from the early 1990s to the present day and examining some of the key themes and issues that emerge, overlap, repeat, and interweave throughout her practice.

Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Arts & Photography

Gallagher, Ellen

Individual Artists

Tate Publishing

This publication will accompany Ellen Gallagher's exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center, which will feature twenty new drawings and a site-specific sculpture. In all of her work, Gallagher merges traditional abstraction with social commentary; this surprising union results in engaging and poetic works that examine the cultural signs of race. The major sculpture in this exhibition and catalogue will have the appearance of a jungle gym, and will be formed of obsessively painted, intertwined wooden dowels. The book as a whole will include essays by several prominent scholars, and will present Gallagher's interest in cultural history, science, and science fiction.

Ellen Gallagher: Preserve

Fleming, Jeff

Kelley, Robin

De Zegher, Catherine

Lubowsky Talbott, Susan

Des Moines Art Center

Ellen Gallagher

<p>Ellen Gallagher has emerged as one of the most acclaimed young artists in the United States over the past decade, and this book will be the first to present a significant body of recent work in one volume. Gallagher inflects the surface of her layered drawings and paintings with unique irony and wit. They refer obliquely to a history of African American stereotypes through minute interventions on the canvas: tongues, eyes, wigs, and lips appear like individual musical notes. Their lack of fully formed bodies underlines the manner in which these stereotypical images were used: appearing as disembodied parts in advertisements, toys, and other products of the popular culture. It is through repetition of this limited vocabulary of signs that meanings are established and transformed in Gallagher's work. The large-scale paintings in the exhibition and this accompanying book explore her personal iconography of forms. Included will be Gallagher's recent all-black paintings as well as a carefully selected group of drawings from the artist's own collection. In addition, it features an extensive interview with the artist, for which she has executed several drawings specifically to illustrate this section, as well as critical essays on the work.</p>

Tate, Greg

Medvedow, Jill

STORR, Robert

D.A.P./ICA Boston

eXelento is a page-by-page assemblage of three monumental paintings by Ellen Gallagher, POMP-BANG, Afrylic, and eXelento, made on the occasion of the exhibition eXelento at Gagosian Gallery in New York, in the fall of 2004. The entire edition of eXelento consists of eight different covers (it is impossible to fill requests for a particular cover unfortunately) each illustrating one detail taken from Gallagher’s monumental paintings. Each painting consists of 396 “pages” represented in the book that Gallagher has culled from advertisements found in Ebony, Our World, and Sepia magazines. Each ad is altered by the application of yellow plasticine prosthesis, usually involving the hair of the figures. Spanning the 1930's through the 1970's, the advertisements are often for wigs and hair treatments, though some promote cures for various maladies - from upset skin to asthma. All of the advertisements offer relief through the promise of possibility and are staged within the tumultuous historic frame of World War II, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Women's Rights movement, through to the Black Power movement of the 1970's. Using an astounding vocabulary of shapes, the transformations of Gallagher's prosthetics from page to page, have a novelistic flow that charts the stylistic constrictions and expansions exercised by a certain population over a certain period of time. However, the associations are also witty and multi directional, seeming to reach from ancient Egypt to Sun Ra.

Ellen Gallagher: Exelento

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

<p>A highly-collectible, limited-edition artists book designed by the artist in collaboration with designer Irma Boom, and featuring an essay by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith. This is an art work in its own right. Five volumes held together by magnets, it provides the opportunity to flip through the artists recent films and savour her beautiful drawings.</p>

Ellen Gallagher: Murmur

Scalo Verlag Ac

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Books by Gallagher, Ellen