Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) is one of the most celebrated painters of her generation, coming to prominence in the mid-1990s in the wake of the so-called ‘culture wars’ and the art world’s controversial embrace of identity-politics and multiculturalism. In this in-depth look at her oeuvre, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith unpacks the complexities of her richly layered paintings, examining themes such as identity, race, displacement, and the ecological environment, which Gallagher has explored throughout her work. The author takes the reader from Gallagher’s early years—looking at her formative influences—through her engagement, from the late 1990s on, with the inherited modernist forms of the monochrome and the grid and with the violence and division at the root of modernism itself. Also explored are her phantasmagoric explorations of oceanic life, which draw on the discoveries of natural science, the traumatic history of the Atlantic slave trade, and the speculative fictions of Afrofuturism. For anyone interested in contemporary art and the ways particular artists are expanding its borders, in form and content, this is essential reading.

This publication will accompany Ellen Gallagher’s exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center, which will feature twenty new drawings and a site-specific sculpture. In all of her work, Gallagher merges traditional abstraction with social commentary; this surprising union results in engaging and poetic works that examine the cultural signs of race. The major sculpture in this exhibition and catalogue will have the appearance of a jungle gym, and will be formed of obsessively painted, intertwined wooden dowels. The book as a whole will include essays by several prominent scholars, and will present Gallagher’s interest in cultural history, science, and science fiction. Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and educated at Oberlin College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She has had solo exhibitions at the Gagosian Gallery in New York and Anthony D’Offay Gallery in London. Her work has been reviewed in major art and general-interest publications throughout the world, including “Artforum,” “W,” the “New York Times,” and many others, and is in major public collections nationwide. She lives and works in New York City and Provincetown, Massachussetts. Essays by Jeff Fleming, Robin D.G. Kelley, Catherine de Zegher. Introduction by Susan Lubowsky Talbott.

Ellen Gallagher is a leading contemporary painter who also creates drawings, prints, sculptures and films. Her works explore the language of Modernist painting with symbolic or narrative content, often touching on issues of representation. This catalogue accompanied the 1998 exhibition, with essays from Claire Doherty and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve.

For 20 years, Parkett has presented unparalleled explorations and discussions of important international contemporary artists by esteemed writers and critics. These investigations continue in issue No. 73, which features collaborations by Paul McCarthy, Ellen Gallagher, and Anri Sala. McCarthy’s probing 1970s performances led us through a portal of LA-based experimental art-making, and brought us face-to-face with our most animalistic urges and repulsions. Get behind McCarthy’s post-pop masquerade and try to unpack the origins of his skewed and spewed sensibility. Also featured are Gallagher’s meditative, collaged canvases. With her tiny toy eyeballs, hilarious Mammy-styled lips, and Plasticine Afros the artist confronts sobering race relations in her work. Sala, an Albanian-born artist, has risen to international fame by making enigmatic, introspective videos, films, and photographs that pulsate with perpetual de-ja-vu. His images fulfill a documentary function–whether that of his mother as a young woman giving an interview for the Communist Party, or two friends on a beach using a flashlight to get ghost crabs to scramble past ankle goalposts in the sand in oder to “score.” Also in Parkett No. 73: artists Jason Dodge, Wangechi Mutu, Tania Bruguera, Lucy McKenzie, Matthew Brannon, and Carsten Nicolai. Writers include Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Michelle Cliff, Ben Okri, Lane Relyea, Tim Martin, Jeremy Sigler, Mark Godfrey, Jan Verwoert, Lynne Cooke, Isolde Brielmaier, RoseLee Goldberg, Algela Rosenberg, Dominic von den Boogerd, Debra Singer, Natasa Petresin, and Fabrice Stroun.

Over the past two decades, the art world has broadened its geographic reach and opened itself to new continents, allowing for a significant cross-pollination of post-conceptual strategies and vernacular modes. Printed materials, in both innovative and traditional forms, have played a key role in this exchange of ideas and sources. This catalogue, published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, examines the evolution of artistic practices related to printmaking, from the resurgence of traditional printing techniques–often used alongside digital technologies–to the worldwide proliferation of self-published artist’s books and ephemera. Print/Out features focused sections on ten artists and publishers–Ai Weiwei, Edition Jacob Samuel, Ellen Gallagher, Martin Kippenberger, Lucy McKenzie, Aleksandra Mir, museum in progress, Robert Rauschenberg, Superflex and Rirkrit Tiravanija–as well as rich illustrations of additional printed projects from the last 20 years by major artists such as Trisha Donnelly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Schütte and Kelley Walker. An introductory essay by Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum, offers an overview of this period with particular attention to new directions and strategies within an expanded field of printmaking.

In recent years, a number of artists have abstracted images culled from slapstick, comic strips and films, cartoons and animation into a new representational mode to address perplexing issues about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence and ethnic and cultural stereotyping. From Julie Mehretu’s intricately layered paintings and Arturo Herrera’s psychological collages made of Walt Disney coloring books to Ellen Gallagher’s seductively Minimalist paintings, permeated by “blackface” signs culled from minstrel performances, to Rivane Neuenschwander’s wiped-out cartoon characters, the world of comic abstraction reflects the intensely personal relationship that many contemporary artists maintain with political currents. This publication, which accompanies a Spring 2007 exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, presents the first major investigation into this new model of representation. It features recent work by 13 artists and a selection of 30 large-scale works and installations that bridge the rift between abstraction and comics in ways that are at once critical and playful. It also includes a critical essay, interviews with the artists, and a selected exhibition history and bibliography. Features work by Polly Apfelbaum, Inka Essenhigh, Ellen Gallagher, Arturo Herrera, Michel Majerus, Julie Mehretu, Juan Munoz, Takashi Murakami, Rivane Neuenschwander, Philippe Parreno, Gary Simmons, Franz West and Sue Williams.

Animals’ was a group exhibition that included artworks by seventeen acclaimed international contemporary artists from Europe and America from 24 Jun – 11 Sep 2004. The works in the exhibition all explore the issue of how the otherness of animals opens up new ways of thinking. Most of the works were new or previously unseen in the UK, with a number made especially for this exhibition. Artists exhibiting include Lothar Baumgarten, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Katharina Fritsch, Ellen Gallagher, John Isaacs, Marina Kappos, Mike Kelley, Oswaldo Macià, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Bruce Nauman, João Onofre, Marjetica Potr, Bojan arevi, Kiki Smith, Diana Thater, Rosemarie Trockel and Bill Viola. The works in the exhibition questioned the common ways we understand animals, and rather than objectifying or anthropomorphising them, present them as beings in their own right, often incomprehensible and mysterious. In Marina Kappos’s video, ‘Beast’, a domestic cat is shown larger than life-size in close-up from below, snarling at some unseen threat. Drawing attention to the similarities and differences between humans and animals the viewers’ everyday notions of human identity are challenged. Looking at animals in this way also encourages the viewer to acknowledge different ways of perceiving the world. Complex use of language differentiates humans from animals, and these works bring a focus to other methods of communication that have tended to be neglected.

The Americans — New Art is the first book to survey the most recent wave of young American contemporary artists, including many individuals who have only just begun to emerge onto the international scene. These artists belong to a generation that has developed an energetic & coherent alternative to the expansive & often brash aesthetic dismantled by the bubble-burst downturn of the American economy at the end of the 1980s. Featuring a selection of the work of 30 artists that demonstrates the use of both cutting-edge & traditional media, the book includes 200 illustrations, offering a stimulating mix of painting, sculpture, installation, photography, film & video. This group, most of whom are in their twenties or thirties, differ significantly from their exuberant Young British Artist counterparts. Their work is marked by a mood of speculation & introspection together with an approach to making art that verges on the obsessive-compulsive. The Americans — New Art includes the work of cult figures such as Fred Tomaselli & Tim Hawkinson, as well as newer names, such as installation artist Ricci Albenda & sculptor Rachel Feinstein; other artists include Jeff Burton, Liz Craft, Rob Pruitt, T J Wilcox, Kara Walker, Arturo Herrera, Jonathan Horowitz, Tony Matelli, Evan Holloway, Tom Friedman, John Pilson, Brian Calvin, Paul Sietsema, Erik Parker, Piotr Uklanski, Ellen Gallagher, Amy Adler & Roe Ethridge. Also includes four essays by leading contemporary art writers, including Barbican Art Gallery curator, Mark Sladen. Published in association with the Barbican Art Gallery, London. Designed by Joseph Burrin at Big Corporate Disco.

Since its inauguration in 1932, the Whitney Biennial has showcased contemporary artistic innovation, becoming a highly anticipated event in the art world. The 2010 Biennial is curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari and features works by approximately 55 artists working in a variety of media and practices. Uniquely, this catalogue serves as both a handsome accompaniment to the 2010 exhibition and an insightful exploration of the significance of this acclaimed and often controversial event throughout its history. In addition to presenting full-color reproductions of the selected artists’ recent work, the curators have prepared a joint essay on the 2010 exhibition, and a group of writers contributed brief entries on the represented artists’ techniques, influences, and recent work. A detailed appendix features a short text on the significance of the museum’s annual and biennial exhibitions in the context of the museum’s history and broader collection, as well as photographs of previous installations, facsimiles of historical reviews, and a chronological list of artists included in past annuals and biennials. Thumbnails of all previous catalogue covers are also included, positioning each Biennial as a snapshot of artistic practice at a particular moment. Participating artists: David Adamo Richard Aldrich Michael Asher Tauba Auerbach Nina Berman Huma Bhabha Josh Brand The Bruce High Quality Foundation James Casebere Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher Dawn Clements George Condo Sarah Crowner Verne Dawson Julia Fish Roland Flexner Suzan Frecon Maureen Gallace Theaster Gates Kate Gilmore Hannah Greely Jesse Aron Green Robert Grosvenor Sharon Hayes Thomas Houseago Alex Hubbard Jessica Jackson Hutchins Jeffrey Inaba Martin Kersels Jim Lutes Babette Mangolte Curtis Mann Ari Marcopoulos Daniel McDonald Josephine Meckseper Rashaad Newsome Kelly Nipper Lorraine O’Grady R.H. Quaytman Charles Ray Emily Roysdon Aki Sasamoto Aurel Schmidt Scott Short Stephanie Sinclair Ania Soliman Storm Tharp Tam Tran Kerry Tribe Piotr Uklanski Lesley Vance Marianne Vitale Erika Vogt Pae White Robert Williams

Double Consciousness explores the conceptual art practices of African-American artists over the past 35 years, using as its underpinning, the “reflexive” nature of art-making which emerged with the avant-garde of the late 1960s. The exhibition chronicles conceptual art as practice of ideas as manifested through the use of everyday materials and objects–performance as action; interventions or critiques; as well as writings. It also focuses on the evolution of conceptual art in subsequent decades as a tool to deconstruct existing precepts regarding gender and race, and as a strategy in presenting ideas regarding the complexities of contemporary society and how artists skillfully negotiate these complexities as it relates to themselves and the community at large. The exhibition’s concept is an aesthetic contribution to the rethinking of DuBois’s “double conciousness” theory that asserts that African-Americans are no longer relegated to looking at themselves through the eyes of others, but rather through their own gaze. The catalogue features a chronology of significant events that have helped shape the language and ideas of artists over the last century as well as an anthology by a few artists in the exhibition–Adrian Piper, Charles Gaines, Arthur Jafa, Howardena Pindell, to name a few. Participating artists include Terry Adkins, Edgar Arceneaux, Sanford Biggers, Ellen Gallagher, Jennie C. Jones, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Gary Simmons, Nari Ward, and others.