Ellen Gallagher: DeLuxe
January 27 through May 15
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
Wednesday-Thursday, Saturday, Sunday 11am-6pm, Friday 1-9pm
Tel: 1-800-WHITNEY
www.whitney.org
Since her first exhibition in 1994, Ellen Gallagher’s art has evolved and coalesced into vibrantly dynamic works that explore issues of identity and transformation within new contexts. Using advertisements and articles taken from mid-century issues of such magazines as Ebony, Our World, and Sepia, she reactivates these found images as characters that recur as a variety of presences located in contemporary and imaginary realities. Gallagher has created in DeLuxe a compendium of sixty images that together form a large-scale work inviting careful examination and consideration.
Gallagher’s art has a fluidity that defies established definitions and limitations of medium. In the experimental environment of Two Palms Press, she has found a collaborative team dedicated to the innovative use of digital technologies to augment traditional printmaking. DeLuxe proposes new possibilities and directions for printmaking in this century.
“I take archival material from the 1930s through the 1970s and reactivate it through a series of transformations using photogravure, drypoint, plasticine, coconut oil, paint, ink, toy eyeballs, gold leaf. These fugitive characters reoccur throughout the grid both as themselves and as other worldly presences. Each repetition is an initiation of that character into an altered state.” Ellen Gallagher, 2005.
