Ellen Gallagher (December 16, 1965 - ) Frieze Magazine Autumn 2013

Ellen Gallagher was born in America. Throughout Gallagher’s work she explores the theme of race and identity using a wide variety of mediums such as the moving image, painting and drawing.

Some of her methods include found imagery in magazines and then manipulating them to express her ideas. Gallagher references to the theme of race whilst making it current to todays marketing.

I find Gallagher’s work very powerful, her use of cut and paste is very effective.

 It is strange to view faces with no eyes this may have been a reaction that Gallagher wanted to shock the audience and make them feel uncomfortable. It appears quite scary in a way as they look like dolls with no thoughts of their own.

 However this draws your focus to the bold yellow wigs perhaps this is why she decided to cut out the eyes. It also makes you focus more on the skin tone.

On the one hand, you feel as though you are looking into emptiness by taking out the eyes there is a loss of character and personality of the person being portrayed. However, the wigs being so different to each other add a whole other level of personality of the character.

I think that the colour scheme is really clever as it takes your attention straight to the focal point of the piece.

Presenting them in a grid form allows the viewer to examine the individual wigs but also so that you can view them together almost appearing as an army. I think that the way Gallagher has spaced her images out is visually interesting as she does have some wigs that overlap each other which is an aspect that I really like as it seems they are interacting with each other.

Ellen Gallagher’s influences include Agnes Martin and writer and artist Gertrude Stein. Gallagher has said that she likes the way Gertrude Stein used text in her art.

Following is an extract from a review of Ellen Gallagher’s exhibition at the Tate by Alastair Smart in the Telegraph.

‘And then there’s her series of Yellow canvases, each one a vast grid containing hundreds of adverts – for wigs, hair straighteners and skin whiteners – lifted from vintage, black-life magazines of the mid-20th century.

Gallagher revisits a benighted time when black cultural identity was so suppressed that a desire to look white was commodified – and she zanily restyles each ad’s model with a hairpiece of yellow Plasticine. Her aim, playfully and retrospectively, is to liberate the models in the process.

One wonders, though, if she’d have made more impact leaving the original ads unaltered, so unsavourily revealing are they in themselves. Unusually, Gallagher seems to be affirming the surface of her work at the expense of what lies beneath.’

I disagree with this review as I felt when I walked around the show that the way that she added her own style of the ridiculous bright yellow wigs brings more of a statement forward than just leaving the ads ‘unaltered’.