ELLEN GALLAGHER
Lips Sink, 2016. Lithograph. 20 x 23 3/8 in. Edition of 20
By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, Ellen Gallagher recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy. She has found inspiration in age-old oceanic myths and stories, including Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, about two elusive mammoths (one a very real whale and the other a very figurative truth). In 2016, Gallagher created the lithograph Lips Sink, depicting the story’s famous surviving artifact, Queequeg’s enigmatically carved coffin.
B. 1965 Providence, Rhode Island
Ellen Gallagher’s minimalist paintings, collages, and films examine the development of African-American stereotypes. The artist Incorporates pop culture ephemera into her work, particularly postwar-era advertisements for hairstyles, wigs, and skin products targeting African-American women. In her "DeLuxe" series (2004–05), Gallagher embellished images of hair-straightening and skin-whitening advertisements from magazines such as Ebony and Sepia. Viewed as intricate abstractions from afar, "DeLuxe" examines formal ideas about materials, seriality, and process alongside its narrative of race. Recurring elements in Gallagher's work include minstrel-like lips, the use of penmanship paper and other found materials applied to canvas, and surfaces transformed to illegibility by methods like smudging, staining, and puncturing.