Dimensions: frame (each): 389 x 325 x 46 mm overall display dimensions: 2149 x 4527 mm
Copyright: © Ellen Gallagher | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Ellen Gallagher's "DeLuxe" is a suite of sixty mixed-media prints playing with advertisements found in vintage African-American magazines. The scale is just massive, it fills your peripheral vision. Editor: My first thought? A cabinet of curiosities, like an attic filled with forgotten faces and half-remembered dreams. Curator: Exactly! Gallagher uses plasticine, paper, and even glitter to transform these ads into something…otherworldly. Look at the recurring motifs—eyes, lips, wigs—archetypes, almost. Editor: Those eyes, in particular, haunt me. They seem to be watching, judging, maybe even pleading. Are they symbols of beauty, or are they trapped in a cycle of imposed ideals? Curator: Perhaps both. Gallagher’s work is brilliant because it refuses easy answers. It challenges us to confront the complexities of identity and representation. She’s playing with how these images were intended versus how they are now. Editor: It's a powerful reminder that even the most seemingly innocent images can carry a heavy weight of cultural baggage. It's like excavating cultural memory.
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The imagery for this print series is based on magazines dating from the 1930s to the 1970s aimed at African-American audiences, many of which feature advertisements for ‘improvements’ including wigs, hair pomades and skin bleaching creams. Gallagher transformed these images using a variety of printing techniques, combining traditional processes of etching and lithography with recent developments in digital technology. She also made modifications by cutting and layering images and text and adding a range of materials including plasticine, glitter, gold leaf, toy eyeballs and coconut oil. Her witty and sophisticated interventions emphasise the complex construction of identity. Gallery label, November 2007