Ellen Gallagher: Are We Obsidian?

In this focused exhibition, Ellen Gallagher’s Untitled (1999) and Watery Ecstatic (2005)—both from the Art Institute’s collection—are placed in dialogue with her Negroes Battling in a Cave (2016) and a selection of two-sided collages from Morphia (2008–12). The presentation underscores themes of transparency and aspiration throughout her multilayered works. 

Since 1997 Gallagher has produced monochromatic paintings that investigate blackness both as color and as fugitive subjectivity. She first adheres a loose grid of penmanship paper to the canvas and layers it with torn and painted pages from magazines such as Ebony. She incises the surface with a blade and then molds black rubber over the surface. Finally, she coats the surface with high-gloss enamel. A recent example of this process of accumulation and redaction is Negroes Battling in a Cave, which takes its title from a racist phrase recently discovered under the composition of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). Like the black paint covering the inscription, the black rubber and enamel conceal yet contain the painting’s origins. 

Gallagher has developed a vocabulary of signs and characters taken from popular culture, marine biology, and historical depictions of race. Her organic forms resemble cells and marine creatures and simultaneously evoke various African iconographies, generating hybrid symbols that evolve and mutate in relation to the viewer’s perception. Gallagher asserts that “a character like a jellyfish can be made up of several different bodies, can exist in different times, can be a character that is symbolic.” This fluidity between meanings and media and between states of being, like crystallizing lava, provokes the question, Are We Obsidian?

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website