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| Ellen Gallagher, Untitled, 2013, oil and ink on canvas, 24 x 24 inches. Image via hauserwirth.com. |
New Work
March 14 – May 3, 2014
Opening:
Thursday, March 13, 2014, 6 – 8 pm
23 Saville Row
London, England
From hauserwirth.com:
Hauser
& Wirth presents a collection of new work by Ellen Gallagher, encompassing
painting, collage and film.
The
exhibition brings together paintings that, with Gallagher’s unique approach,
combine paper and canvas, stretched and bleached and incised. Striated areas,
mimicking machine-printed lines, contrast with expressive accumulations of
ink-stained printed matter. Using slivered cuttings of found fragments to
extend rambling seascape-like abstractions which read like pictographic texts,
Gallagher isolates individual brutalist forms within an otherwise diaphanous
expanse: a cartoonish visage hovers against double barred lines in ‘Dr.
Blowfin’s Black Storm’ (2014); and in ‘Stabilizing Spheres’ (2014), sooty
medusas stand against blocks of stretched arcs forming a hieroglyphic language
breaking over and under the undulating web of Penmanship paper. In ‘Untitled’
(2013), Gallagher draws us to the ocean floor where the textured fragments
suggest multiple versions of a single event gravitating together within the
components of her phantom creatures, constantly pulling forward and retracting
with the ocean’s tide. Gallagher’s synergistic painting process extends to the
titles of her works. ‘Dr. Blowfins’ Black Storm Stabilizing Spheres’ is a
single track from Harnessed The Storm, the 2002 EP by the experimental musical
duo Drexciya. Here, Gallagher divides the title into two interlocking but
discreet works.
A similar
process of de-multiplication is found in ‘Ark’ (2014), a double-sided paper
construction made up of layered magazine pages, which are glued together to
form a dense accumulation of sealed pages. One side is painted over in heavy
white gouache and the printed pages underneath bleed through to produce an
uneven pinkish tone. The other side originates in an advertisement for Cutty
Sark whisky. Using a scalpel, Gallagher removes small paper forms, before
turning them back-to-front and re-inserting them into the absent spaces. The
configuration of the painted side depends on the amnesia of its opposite side,
with the effect that both sides of the work are interdependent – coactively
making and unmaking each other.
In another
series of paintings, Gallagher foregrounds the symbiotic feeding habits of
certain birds she has observed into the apprehension of the painting’s surface.
Gallagher’s birds are embedded in a swirling mass of distended, intestinal
coils buried deep within layers of paint. Her painted layers are incised and repeatedly
re-applied and scratched away, releasing the buried needle incisions to the
surface of the painting as oblique passages that recall snail trails. Garbled
vowels are revealed from within the bird’s wings, or used to create speckled
backs.
Edgar Cleijne
and Ellen Gallagher’s new film projection explores what the artists call
‘different aspects of representation’, drawing its title from Sun Ra’s 1970
album and poem ‘Nothing Is …’. A line from the poem, ‘The nothing and the air
and the fire are really the same’ describes Sun Ra’s thoughts on origins and
elements teetering on the brink of multiple states simultaneously being and
not-being. The mutability of elements is also a source of inspiration for
science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, who figures in the film on either side
of Sun Ra’s poetry; the two men converge in a state of transition, possessed by
light as the film moves from one frame to the next. The finely detailed work
combines manual dexterity with technological mastery: the film itself is threaded
through a hand-made harp tuned to the key of Ra.
ABOUT
THE ARTIST
Ellen
Gallagher (b. 1965, Providence, Rhode Island) lives and works in New York and
Rotterdam. Gallagher’s touring exhibition ‘AxME’ will be on display at Haus der
Kunst, Munich, Germany, until 13 July 2014, following presentations at Sara
Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland and Tate Modern, London, England in 2013.
Other recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Ice or Salt’, SCAD Museum of
Art, Savannah GA (2013); ‘Don’t Axe Me’, New Museum, New York NY (2013); ‘An
Experiment of Unusual Opportunity’, South London Gallery, London, England
(2009); ‘Coral Cities’, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England travelling to Hugh
Lane Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, ‘DeLuxe’, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2005);
‘Murmur and DeLuxe’, MOCA, Miami (2005); and ‘Ichthyosaurus’, The Freud
Museum, London (2005). In 2000 she was awarded the American Academy Award in
Art and in 2003 was selected for the Venice Biennale
Ellen
Gallagher in Conversation with Naomi Wallace: Ports, Portals and Portrayals
Saturday, March 15, 2014, 5:30 pm
The Royal Institution of Great Britian
Library
and Georgian Room
21
Albemarle Street
London,
England
Naomi
Wallace, acclaimed American playwright, speaks to Ellen Gallagher about
projection, transmutation and the influence of Sun Ra on her practice.
Admission
free but booking recommended. Please email rsvp@hauserwirth.com to book.
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