Painting, drawing, collage, film, sculpture. Nature, fantasy, social history – you name it, and Ellen Gallagher is brilliantly adept at it, as this look back at the American’s career to date, called AxME, shows so clearly. Now living and working in Rotterdam and New York, Gallagher rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with her work around the iconography of minstrels, and continued with subversive interventions of print advertisements aimed at black Americans, often focusing on artificial hair and using grid-like collages, as in the “Wigmap” pieces.
Sci-fi watercolours followed, and with 2006’s Bird in Hand, Gallagher dived head first into the world of fantasy, presenting a mixed media construction of gold leaf, paint, and even plasticine to build up her underwater version of Atlantis. She shows no signs of standing still, and this exhibition at Tate Modern, running until 1st September, including work completed as recently as this year, continues to be a winning blend of multi-disciplinary skill and inventiveness.
Ellen Gallagher
Wiglette from DeLuxe 2004
Photogravure and plasticine
© Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher
Abu Simbel 2005
© Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher
American Beauty (Row 2, Print 14) 2004
Gagosian Gallery
© Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher
Bird in Hand 2006
Tate.
© Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher
Untitled
2013
Courtesy of the artist
© Ellen Gallagher
Photo: Ernst Moritz
