Ellen Gallagher

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 backbone of this collective unit is the elongated spine of Cézanne’s Scipio (1866-68), on loan from Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Brazil. Triangulating this painting and flanking the Stedelijk’s Hall of Honor are two of Gallagher’s Black Paintings, Untitled and Eleganza, which usher in waves of deep-sea blackness. Gallagher links her own application of black rubber in these paintings to Cézanne’s use of thick layers of black paint in his speculative figuration of the black body in Scipio. She proposes that Cézanne, stirred by the photograph of a disfigured slave named Gordon that was widely circulated by abolitionists, employed black paint like one might apply petroleum jelly to a burn wound. In a way, his layers of paint healed and reversed time, transforming the back of the mutilated slave and reverting to an elastic moment of futurity before the scar has formed—the potent instance of pre-calcified trauma, or the precarious site of potential known as no man’s land.

This reversal to a transitional moment of a possibility recalls the war-torn trenches from which WWI band leader James Reese Europe composed contrametric tracks such as the titular 1919 All of No Man’s Land is Ours, which pulsates with the promise of return home, while simultaneously enacting a dual refusal of blackface: be it the soot covered faces of vaudevillian minstrels or bombed soldiers. In rhythmic step with the intentional jitter of Europe’s composition, Gallagher’s built-up constructions manifest a process of ebb and flow, and accumulation and redaction.

With the installation as a collective body, Gallagher creates a fluid dynamic between two new paintings, four of her earlier works, Paul Cézanne’s Scipio and a commissioned text by Jordan Carter, curator and co-department head at Dia Art Foundation. Jointly they produce new understandings: known meanings are altered to merge into the relationships that arise from the interaction and space between the works on display at the Stedelijk Museum.