Ellen Gallagher

In late September the Hugh Lane will host an exhibition of work by American artist Ellen Gallagher. Gallagher is widely known as a leading contemporary painter who draws on diverse sources and subjects from fine art, popular culture, history, fashion, music and science to create works that are both visually stunning and imbued with conceptual richness. This exhibition will focus on her ongoing body of work, entitled Watery Ecstatic, which explores the myth of Drexciya, an Atlantis-like underwater world populated by a marine species descended from women and children who escaped from slave ships during the journey from Africa to America. Gallagher revises and revisions the fantastical and historic to create a body of work that layers imageries and creates new cultural mythologies.

Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965, and lives and works in New York and Rotterdam, Holland. Her work first gained international attention at the Whitney Biennial in 1995. She has exhibited widely with recent solo exhibitions at the Freud Museum, London (2005), MoCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2005) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005).

This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Tate Liverpool.

A full colour publication, published by Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and Tate Liverpool, will accompany the exhibition and be available in September.

Ellen Gallagher
CORAL CITIES