Ellen Gallagher: Exelento

eXelento is a page-by-page assemblage of three monumental paintings by Ellen Gallagher, POMP-BANG, Afrylic, and eXelento, made on the occasion of the exhibition eXelento at Gagosian Gallery in New York, in the fall of 2004. The entire edition of eXelento consists of eight different covers (it is impossible to fill requests for a particular cover unfortunately) each illustrating one detail taken from Gallagher’s monumental paintings. Each painting consists of 396 “pages” represented in the book that Gallagher has culled from advertisements found in Ebony, Our World, and Sepia magazines. Each ad is altered by the application of yellow plasticine prosthesis, usually involving the hair of the figures. Spanning the 1930's through the 1970's, the advertisements are often for wigs and hair treatments, though some promote cures for various maladies - from upset skin to asthma. All of the advertisements offer relief through the promise of possibility and are staged within the tumultuous historic frame of World War II, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Women's Rights movement, through to the Black Power movement of the 1970's. Using an astounding vocabulary of shapes, the transformations of Gallagher's prosthetics from page to page, have a novelistic flow that charts the stylistic constrictions and expansions exercised by a certain population over a certain period of time. However, the associations are also witty and multi directional, seeming to reach from ancient Egypt to Sun Ra.