Ellen Gallagher AxME

AxME is Gallaghers first major retroperspective in the uk.

This was the map for Gallaghers show, from the entrance to the exit; the exhibition was planned in every detail with 11 rooms, every room had was set in dates and collections of her work. Personally my favourite was room 4, and this is beacuse the most texture was used on her work from 'Black Paintings' 1998 - 2002. I thought it was stunning with the abstract forms of: heads, Dancing figures and landscapes.

 

This has to be one of my favourite exhibitions so far! I loved the work she produced, it was beautiful. In this exhibition she has used a large variety of techniques and skills which were: Painting, drawing, sculpture, collage and film; she often combined multiple media in a single piece. On some of these pieces she has: cuts, mounts, prints, blots and inscribes to build up surfaces or scarpe them away. The results were the thickest texture of each work. This is the part where i fell in love with her work. The textures she had created were unique and amazing. The development and process of her work was mark-making.

Gallaghers subject matter also defies simple catigorisation from fantastical marine organisms, to advertisements from vintage magazines, googly eyes, viscous wigs made of modelling clay, and fields of repetitive marks that may be abstract, figurative, or occupy the ambiguous order between the two.
Gallagher was known for her painting with exaggerated lips and eyes, associated with black people in cartoons or minstrel shows. Her later works draw upon wig advertisements, science fiction, oceanography and the novels of Herman Melville. Another important motif was music with imagination and baroque wordplay, of Jazz/Funk.

"You start off with a limited class of signs and, like jazz, you revisit and repeat with slight changes and build structure... Its a shifting loop that with each rotation doesnt line up precisely."

Her work, in room 4:

My rough notes and sketches