ART CITIES: Amsterdam-Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher builds multi-layered paintings that pivot between the natural world, mythology and history. Her painting process involves undoing and reforming trains of thought often over long periods of time and across linked bodies of works. Over a highly multifaceted career, Gallagher’s work has been united by what she calls a ‘jitter,’ an intellectual approach in which aesthetic possibilities are shook loose from seismic cracks beneath the surface of cultural entities normally thought to be unshakable and impermeable.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive

In “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours”, her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, Ellen Gallagher premieres new works alongside a selection of earlier paintings. Gallagher has transformed the historic IMC Gallery of the Stedelijk Museum, into a consideration of a futurity that has been with us all along. Ellen Gallagher builds conceptually and materially layered compositions that link seemingly incommensurable phenomena. To create her compelling works Gallagher uses diverse techniques, references and stories: human and nonhuman, fiction and scientific fact, painted and carved, music and archeology, speculative and proven. From the syncopated compositions of Cézanne and James Reese Europe to the underwater ecosystems of drowned slaves and sunken whales, these diverse entities and events become contingent forces of insistent iteration, bridging figuration and abstraction, ocean and earth, and life and death in the interstitial and generative space of no return that is no man’s land. Gallagher’s compositions variably map and notate this nebulous and protean in-between space. The distinct, yet interrelated works comprising All of No Man’s Land Is Ours demarcate a site of possibility built up through repeated units of will. Indeed, the unit—the brushstroke or musical beat, the grid or map coordinate, the paper cut-out, the palladium vertebrae—become embodied acts of worldbuilding in the artist’s visual and conceptual lexicon. The backbone of this collective unit is the elongated spine of Cézanne’s “Scipio” (1866-68), on loan from Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Triangulating this painting and flanking the Stedelijk’s Hall of Honor are two of Gallagher’s “Black” Paintings, “Untitled” and “Eleganza”, which usher in waves of deep-sea blackness. Gallagher links her own application of black rubber in these paintings to Cézanne’s use of thick layers of black paint in his speculative figuration of the black body in Scipio. She proposes that Cézanne, stirred by the photograph of a disfigured slave named Gordon that was widely circulated by abolitionists, employed black paint like one might apply petroleum jelly to a burn wound. In a way, his layers of paint healed and reversed time, transforming the back of the mutilated slave and reverting to an elastic moment of futurity before the scar has formed—the potent instance of pre-calcified trauma, or the precarious site of potential known as no man’s land. This reversal to a transitional moment of a possibility recalls the war-torn trenches from which WWI band leader James Reese Europe composed contra-metric tracks such as the titular “All of No Man’s Land is Ours” (1919), which pulsates with the promise of return home, while simultaneously enacting a dual refusal of blackface: be it the soot covered faces of vaudevillian minstrels or bombed soldiers. In rhythmic step with the intentional jitter of Europe’s composition, Gallagher’s built-up constructions manifest a process of ebb and flow, and accumulation and redaction. With the installation as a collective body, Gallagher creates a fluid dynamic between two new paintings, four of her earlier works, Paul Cézanne’s “Scipio” and a commissioned text by Jordan Carter. Jointly they produce new understandings: known meanings are altered to merge into the relationships that arise from the interaction and space between the works on display at the Stedelijk Museum. Gallagher’s constellation of works charts liminal states and sites of futurity, from the pre-keloid back of Cézanne’s “Scipio” to the deep-sea depths of the Middle Passage, where prehuman and speculative life productively intermingle in the vertical descent of whalefall.

Photo: Ellen Gallagher, Ecstatic Draught of Fishes, 2022. In Ellen Gallagher — All of No Man’s Land is Ours, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The George Economou Collection. Photo: Peter Tijhuis

Info: Curator: Vincent van Velsen, Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 2/12/2023-10/3/2024, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.stedelijk.nl/