Ellen Gallagher

Gallagher’s process involves undoing and reforming trains of thought often over long periods of time and across linked bodies of works. This exhibition presents new large-scale paintings and watercolor works on paper by the artist, including a continuation of her Watery Ecstatic works (2001—ongoing) and a recent series of paintings Ecstatic Draught of Fishes begun in 2019.

In a new group of works on paper from Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic series, the artist employs oceanographic history, Black-Atlantis mythology, and ideas around colonial mapping to cultivate complex biomorphic forms. The most resounding influence of the new watercolors comes from the mappings of 17th-century Dutch artist Albert Eckhout, who travelled with the Dutch Royal Court in the 1630s to document their conquest of the prosperous sugarcane-producing region in the northeast of the Portuguese colony, Brazil. Gallagher’s watercolors probe and draw upon ‘commodity portraits’ of the African and Indigenous populations of Brazil that Eckhout produced as part of a project of imperial mapping intended to catalogue the local flora, fauna, people, and customs in the new territory.

‘Since 2001, the series Watery Ecstatic, and now the new series of paintings, Ecstatic Draught of Fishes, which began in 2019, have been concerned with that mythic underwater ecosystem: the new octopus watercolor, which is part of the longer- standing series, belongs to that preoccupation. Within that context, the octopus is one of those organisms that, in its otherworldliness, straddles the boundary between scientific fact and fiction.’—Carol Armstrong, Professor of History of Art at Yale University

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