Gallery Visit: Ellen Gallagher Retrospective at Tate Modern

Ellen Gallagher: AxME

I didn't know anything about Ellen Gallagher when I walked into this gallery so approached this exhibition without any pre-conceived ideas. This was a very extensive exhibition and somewhat overwhelming in scale but I found it very interesting and it was really helpful in terms of thinking about what drawing can be in terms of materiality. It would be foolish to try to describe the whole content of the exhibition so I'll just pick out a few pieces.

One of the rooms contained some very large pieces made in a grid arrangement Link to image of Pompbang 2003. the grid contains images of black women taken from magazine adverts for wigs and skin creams. Gallagher has modified the images by sticking wigs of pale yellow plasticine onto the pictures. This seems to communicate something about African American women and their identity. The adverts seem to be advertising products to make them look less African. Gallagher has taken this a step further by making them blond. In fact on one of the grid sections I noticed that one of the women's faces had been obliterated by a large white blob.

I wasn't surprised, therefore to learn that Gallagher has African-American (as well as Irish) heritage. 

The issue of race and identity is further raised in several other works in which Gallagher uses penmanship paper (Used by children to aid in practising handwriting) and repeats the motif of googly eyes and fat blubbery lips over and over again. These motifs are borrowed from the tradition of blacked up minstrels in stage and film. One example is Oh! Susannah Seen Here on the Moma website it is named after the song which originated from a slaves lament about families being torn apart but was appropriated by the gold rushers to apparently lose its racial overtone and become just about loss.From a distance this looks like a sort of abstract landscape but on closer inspection the marks are those symbols of racial stereotyping previously mentioned.

In one of the rooms there was a series of paintings painted entirely black. It would be impossible to reproduce the effects of these paintings in a photograph as they depend on the viewer moving around them to see the textured relief as it catches the light. Gallagher has cut bits of rubber in abstract forms and clustered them on the canvas to produce larger images such as a woman's head. They are then painted over with black enamel paint. This made me think about Gary Hume's 'Beautiful' which I had seen the day before as there is some parallel here in technique. Gallagher described these paintings as 'a kind of refusal. Even when reading them- if you stand in front of them they go blank and then if you stand to the side you see only a little'.

In another room I found the Morphia series. These works of collage, watercolour, pencil and ink on paper are suspended inside glass so that they can be viewed from both sides. The artist has worked on developing the images on each side of the paper so that both sides are equally important. The images are not always clear they include wig-like structures and other things that resemble sea creatures.

I really loved two large pieces entitled 'Puppy Chow' and Ok Corral although I still don't understand what the content is. I love the way that the artist has created the image. She has taken thin strips of paper cut from magazines and soaked them in indigo ink. The pieces are stuck together then recut again. She has created a beautiful mosaic-like structure from these pieces. The pieces seem to be more about the materials and their construction than about communicating an idea.

An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity has something disquieting about it. It was a very dark piece with various shapes represented which resembled sea creatures. When I learned whet it was about it really made me shudder. The Experiment refers to an unethical medical experiment in which hundreds of African American men with syphilis remained untreated despite penicillin being an established treatment - simply because the doctors needed autopsy material. The men were therefore allowed to die when their lives could have been saved. I can't say I really understand how the forms depicted represent the subject matter but it is certainly effective in creating disquiet. Maybe the forms are a development of her previous work 'Watery Ecstatic' (see below)

'Watery Ecstatic' is about a mythical underwater Black Atlantis populated by sea creatures descended from drowned slaves. Here I appreciated the number of different materials and techniques that the artist has used, I was particularly interested in the use of incisions through layers of paper to make a drawing. Link to Image here

Ellen Gallagher is certainly a very prolific artist who uses a wide variety of techniques and explores a number of themes and ideas. I found this a very rewarding experience and was pleased that I visited this exhibition. The title AxME is a play on the black American slang for Ask me and 'Acme Corporation' - the fictional company that Wylie Coyote orders all his Road Runner trapping devices from.