Ellen Gallagher
All of no Man's Land is Ours
Exhibition — Dec 2, 2023 until Mar 10, 2024
The Stedelijk Museum presents a new exhibition by Rotterdam-based American artist Ellen Gallagher (1965, Providence, Rhode Island, US). It is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Amsterdam. The installation reflects the diversity of Gallagher’s artistic practice in which painting, cut and carved rubber, crumpled notebook papers and metal beat to airy thinness intertwine in a dynamic relationship. Gallagher transforms the historic building’s IMC Gallery (also known as the ‘Hall of Honor’, where all routes in the museum converge) 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.
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Installation view, Ellen Gallagher — 'All of No Man’s Land is Ours', Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo: Peter Tijhuis -
Installation view, Ellen Gallagher — 'All of No Man’s Land is Ours', Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo: Peter Tijhuis -
Installation view, Ellen Gallagher — 'All of No Man’s Land is Ours', Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo: Peter Tijhuis
About the exhibition
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 exhibition Ellen Gallagher — All of No Man’s Land is Ours is curated by Vincent van Velsen.
Sponsored by ABN AMRO and supported by the Mondriaan Fund.
With special thanks to:
