Tate Modern presents Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Tate Modern presents Ellen Gallagher: AxME an exhibition on view through 1 September 2013.

This survey exhibition takes an overview of Gallagher’s practice, exploring the themes which have emerged and recurred from her seminal early canvases, to her ‘wigmap’ grid collages, through to recent film installations and new bodies of work. The exhibition includes such key works as Bird in Hand, 2006, a complex relief built up in layers of printed matter, plasticine, crystal, paint and gold leaf. In Bird in Hand, human life and marine life converge at the bottom of the ocean in a mythical black Atlantis.

Gallagher’s mysterious vision of marine life extends beyond the canvas and into other media, such as the 16mm film installation Murmur, 2003-4, created in collaboration with Edgar Cleijne, as well as the ongoing series of delicate watercolours and cut paper works titled Watery Ecstatic. The large-scale sculptural installation Preserve, 2001, is also on display, which appears to be an abstract matrix of white poles, but on closer inspection becomes an intricate network of symbols referencing the traditions of whale-bone carving. New and recent work on display for the first time at Tate Modern, including Morphia, a series of two-sided drawings, also show how Gallagher combines the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical and history with the present.

Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965 and now lives and works in Rotterdam and New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have included those held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and New Museum, New York. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 1997 and an American Academy Award in Art in 2000 and her work is held in many major public collections, including MoMA, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Ellen Gallagher: AxME is curated by Juliet Bingham, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern, with Loren Hansi Momodu, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue by Tate Publishing designed by Irma Boom and will tour to the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland in autumn 2013 and Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany in spring 2014.

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom
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