Exhibition Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Ellen Gallagher — AxME EXHIBITION – Ellen Gallagher (born 1965) brings together imagery from myth, nature, art and social history to create complex works in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, and film. Through a painstaking process of obscuring and layering she transforms imagery from an eclectic range of literature, music, or advertising until only traces of them are left visible through a veil of inky smudges, punctures, stains and abrasions to suggest a strange and unsettling imaginary world. In 1986 Ellen Gallagher spent a semester aboard an oceanographic research vessel examining the migratory patterns of pteropods – microscopic wing-footed snails, and drawing them. In a series of watercolours she recalls these studies of natural history (“Coral Cities“, 2007). The people of 'Drexciya' represent the main inhabitants of this series. Drexciya is a mythic black Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean