Эллен Галлахер
إلين غالاغر
埃伦·加拉格尔
엘렌 갤러거
エレン・ギャラガー
dream girl

source: art21org

Ellen Gallagher nasceu em Providence, Rhode Island, em 1965, e vive e trabalha em Nova York e Roterdã, na Holanda. Ela participou Oberlin College ea Escola do Museu de Belas Artes de Boston. Repetição e revisão são fundamentais para o tratamento de Gallagher de anúncios que ela se apropria de revistas populares como “Ebony”, “Nosso Mundo”, e “Sepia” e usa em obras como “eXelento” (2004) e “DeLuxe” (2004-05) . Inicialmente, Gallagher foi atraído para os anúncios peruca por causa de sua estrutura de grade-like. Mais tarde, ela percebeu que era a língua de acompanhamento que atraiu ela, e ela começou a trazer estas “narrativas” em suas pinturas-fazê-los funcionar através dos personagens dos anúncios, como uma espécie de carta de mundos perdidos. Embora o trabalho tem sido muitas vezes interpretado estritamente como um exame de raça, Gallagher também sugere uma leitura mais formal com respeito a materiais, processos e insistências. De longe, o trabalho parece abstrato e mínima; após uma inspeção mais próxima, com os olhos arregalados, perucas reconfigurados, línguas e lábios de caricaturas de menestréis multiplicar em detalhe. Gallagher foi influenciada pela estética sublimes de pinturas de Agnes Martin, bem como as mudanças sutis e repetições da escrita de Gertrude Stein. Em suas obras anteriores, Gallagher colado páginas de papel caligrafia na lona esticada e, em seguida, desenhou e pintou nele. Em “Watery Ecstatic” (2002-04), ela literalmente esculpido imagens em papel grosso da aguarela, em sua própria versão do scrimshaw, a partir do qual emergem as imagens das criaturas do mar de Drexciya, um mítico subaquático Preto Atlantis. Gallagher recebeu o Prêmio da Academia Americana de Artes e Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Exposições individuais incluem Museu Whitney de Arte Americana; Museu de Arte Contemporânea, North Miami; Museu de Arte de St. Louis; Des Moines Art Center; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; e do Instituto de Arte Contemporânea de Boston.
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source: gagosian

From the outset of her career, Gallagher has brought together non-representational formal concerns and charged figuration in paintings, drawings, collages, and films that reveal themselves slowly, first as intricate abstractions, then later as unnerving stories. The tension sustained between minimalist abstraction and image-based narratives deriving from her use of found materials gives rise to a dynamic that posits the historical constructions of the “New Negro”—a central development of the Harlem Renaissance—with concurrent developments in modernist abstraction. In doing so, she points to the artificiality of the perceived schism between figuration and abstraction in art.

Selecting from a wealth of popular ephemera—lined penmanship paper, magazine pages, journals, and advertising—as support for her paintings and drawings, Gallagher subjects the original elements and motifs to intense and laborious processes of transformation including accumulation, erasure, interruption and interference. Like forensic evidence, only traces of their original state remain, veiled by inky saturation, smudges, staining, perforations, punctures, spills, abrasions, printed lettering and marking, all potent evocations and emanations of time and its materiality. This attained state of “un-knowing” fascinates Gallagher and is one of the primary themes in her work.

Ellen Gallagher was born in 1965 in Providence, Rhode Island and studied at Oberlin College, Ohio (1982–84); Studio 70, Fort Thomas, Kentucky (1989); School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts (1992); and Skowhegan School of Art, Maine (1993). In 2000 Gallagher was awarded the American Academy Award in Art and participated in the Biennale di Venezia in 2003. Her work is represented in public collections including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include “Watery Ecstatic,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2001; traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney through 2002); “Preserve,” Des Moines Art Center, De Moines (2001; traveled to Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco; and The Drawing Center, New York through 2002); St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2003); “Ichthyosaurus,” Freud Museum, London (2005); “Deluxe,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2005); “An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity,” South London Gallery; London (2009); “Ice or Salt,” SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, (2013); “Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me,” New Museum, New York (2013); “Ellen Gallagher: AxME,” Tate Modern, London, (2013; traveled to Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere ; and Haus der Kunst, Munich through 2014).

Gallagher currently lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and New York City.
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source: tateorguk

American artist Ellen Gallagher has Irish and African American origins, which have shaped the texture and subject matter of her practice. Sources include the vaudeville tradition of black minstrels, science fiction and advertising targeted at African Americans.
Gallagher has relied on the repetition and revision of minimalist structures since her early career; the subtle shifts and repetitions in the writing of Gertrude Stein have long been an influence, along with the sublime paintings of Agnes Martin. Minimalist geometry is used as an empty shell into which controversial or taboo subject matter relating to gender, race and history is inserted.
In the mid 1990s Gallagher began a series of large scale work including Paper Cup, which envelopes the viewer in a textured, apparently abstract surface which is actually a historic cosmology of repeated shapes – the rubbery lips, bow ties and rolling eyes of the vaudeville minstrels. In 1998 she developed a related series of black enamel paintings, inscribing the dark surface with calligraphic features relating to the minstrel stereotype.
Recent developments have seen Gallagher collecting and appropriating images from magazines aimed at African American women, many of them suggesting the use of prosthetic enhancements to diminish blackness. In collaging a range of materials into the surfaces, including plasticine, rubber and coconut oil, Gallagher adds her own humorous prostheses, developing a personal visual language.
Gallagher’s work expresses on the one hand how to be in the present, pushing forward the traditions and boundaries of painting; on the other, it reminds the viewer that however insignificant they may become, designations from the past continue to multiply and form part of the texture of the world today.