DESCRIPTION

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Ellen Gallagher: eXelento at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York.

Designed by the artist with Edgar Cleijne, the volume comprises a page-by-page assemblage of three monumental paintings by Gallagher: Pomp Bang (2003), Afrylic (2004), and eXelento (2004). Each painting consists of a grid of 396 individual portraits appropriated from advertisements collected from Black publications such as Our World and Ebony. Spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, the ads are often for wigs and hair treatments, though some promote cures for various maladies from upset skin to asthma. Working from left to right, Gallagher makes incisions in the portraits and builds a Plasticine prosthetic or wig onto each character.

The book was produced in eight different covers.

Dimensions: 6 × 8 1/4 inches (15.3 × 21 cm)
Pages: 1,188

ABOUT THE ARTIST

What is crucial to my making of a language and a cosmology of signs is the type of repetition that is central to a lot of the music I am listening to right now. . . . I start off with a limited class of signs and, like stacking in music, I chop and revisit the changes to build structure.
—Ellen Gallagher

Through processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction, Ellen Gallagher has invented a densely saturated visual language in which overlapping patterns, motifs, and materials pulse with life. By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, she recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy—unsettling designations of race and nation, art and artifact, and allowing the familiar and the arcane to converge.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Gallagher attended Oberlin College, Ohio; artist Michael Skop’s private art school Studio 70; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (graduating in 1992 and receiving a traveling scholar award in 1993); and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1993). Her interests in these years spanned across disciplines and time periods, including oceanography, microscopic life, popular media, the poetics of Black vernacular language, and the formal geometries of postwar abstraction. In her first major body of work, made in the mid-1990s, Gallagher applied penmanship paper to canvas in uneven grids, filling the pages with small repeated pairs of stylized lips that she both drew and printed in blue ink. These works thus hinged the aesthetics of 1960s Minimalism to racist minstrelsy and blackface physiognomy. Other biomorphic forms (eyes, tongues, and hair) appear in abstract clusters throughout her oeuvre.

In the multipart works eXelento (2004), Afrylic (2004), and DeLuxe (2004–05), black-and-white images pulled from archival magazines—issues of Ebony, Sepia, and Our World from 1939 to 1972—are digitally scanned, recombined, and overlaid with Plasticine, velvet, googly eyes, and oil. Many of the found images are advertisements for slimming aids, underwear, hair relaxers, wigs, and skin bleaching creams targeted to African American women. DeLuxe was the subject of Gallagher’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2004–05.