kool collage

love these collages by Ellen Gallagher on view temporarily at MoMA.

"Repetition and revision are central to Gallagher’s treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines like “Ebony,” “Our World,” and “Sepia” and uses in works like “eXelento” (2004) and “DeLuxe” (2004-05). Initially, Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure. Later she realized that it was the accompanying language that attracted her, and she began to bring these ‘narratives’ into her paintings—making them function through the characters of the advertisements as a kind of chart of lost worlds. Although the work has often been interpreted strictly as an examination of race, Gallagher also suggests a more formal reading with respect to materials, processes, and insistences. From afar, the work appears abstract and minimal. Upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues, and lips of minstrel caricatures multiply in detail. Gallagher has been influenced by the sublime aesthetics of Agnes Martin’s paintings as well the subtle shifts and repetitions of Gertrude Stein’s writing."- art21