# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt6GpQgg_Y0
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16045099-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/c6cdf0ff01.jpg
- **Posted:** 2019-02-15T15:43:00.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an #ArtistInAction.
.
Ellen Gallagher (b. 1965) is an American artist who challenges the abstraction and figuration dichotomy by using minimalistic techniques to deconstruct the insidious racial stereotypes and narratives present in our visual culture. Gallagher’s film, collage, drawings, and paintings, are formal investigations into materiality that powerfully demean the visual narratives present in found images sourced from magazines. Using modernist techniques like staining, spilling, and other aggressive mark-making, Gallagher transforms the original content of the pictures into an unknown image. The “DeLuxe” series of collages used cutouts from beauty adverts sourced from magazines like Ebony and Sepia. The images promoted beauty products and wigs, but Gallagher’s formal interventions transform their messages into parody and subversion. “What’s seen as political in [my] work is a kind of one-to-one reading of the signs as opposed to a more formal reading of the materials…” the artist explains, “I think people get overwhelmed by the super-signs of race when, in fact, my relationship to some of the more over-determined signs in the work is very tangential. What I think is more repeated than that in the work is a kind of mutability and moodiness to the signs ... And I think that’s where you can talk about race in my work ... that idea of the abstract ‘I’ ... what it means to look at somebody who was eighteen in 1939 ... whatever she was. That’s specificity. It’s impossible to know who that was. But try anyway to have some kind of imaginative space with that sign….”
.
In 2002, The Drawing Center exhibited “Preserve,” a body of mixed media drawings by Ellen Gallagher, the catalog of which is available to purchase ($10) on our website.
#EllenGallagher
.
Image: Photograph by James Mollison. Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, 2013.

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 1,199
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 8

## Tags

ellengallagher, artistinaction

---
Copyright (c) Gondola