Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher  oogaboogah  1994

“Although the techniques which Gallagher invented or reinvented for herself are labor intensive, the finished work is sprightly and full of visual wit. Agnes Martin may be in the background, but Paul Klee and Jean Arp skitter across the foreground at unpredictable intervals. At times this antic quality and the full measure of pictorial space allotted simple forms in flux is also reminiscent of Susan Rothenberg's paintings of the early 1980s. Like Rothenberg in that period, Gallagher has a fairly limited repertoire of basic ideograms but also like Rothenberg she deploys with a freedom that is always surprising and always evocative in ways that can only happen when an artist takes full advantage of their intuition to beat a system of their own devising.”

                                                                      Robert Storr