Dimensions: support: 2135 x 1830 x 41 mm
Copyright: © Ellen Gallagher | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: At the Tate, we have Ellen Gallagher's "Paper Cup", a large-scale work using paper and ink. It strikes me as almost meditative in its repetition. Editor: It feels like faded denim seen through a hazy window. Almost... soothingly monotonous? Is that a contradiction? Curator: Perhaps not. Gallagher's work frequently engages with themes of identity and representation, particularly within the context of racial stereotypes and historical narratives. The grid-like structure, the seemingly endless repetition, could be interpreted as a commentary on the systemic nature of these issues. Editor: So, the soothing quality is deceptive? Underneath, there's a sense of… being trapped? Or endlessly defined? It's like looking at a pattern in your mind that won't go away. Curator: Precisely. The scale itself is significant. It engulfs the viewer, forcing them to confront the immensity and pervasiveness of these historical and social constructs. Editor: I get that. The more I look, the more I see a delicate, almost fragile beauty… but also the echoes of something much larger, something inescapable. Curator: Gallagher invites us to contemplate the intricate layers of meaning embedded within seemingly simple forms. Editor: And maybe, she reminds us that even monotony can be a powerful form of resistance.
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Paper Cup is a large-scale, multi-layered work on canvas that combines geometric abstraction derived from a collage of lined paper segments, with hand-drawn representational elements. It is part of artist Ellen Gallagher’s first mature body of work from the mid-1990s. The artist covered the entire surface of the painting’s stretched cotton canvas support with eighty-four horizontal sheets of yellow writing paper, arranged in twelve rows of seven pieces each. In layering the canvas with these small sheets of paper, the artist introduced a degree of imperfection to the work, with variations in the size of individual sheets and areas of overlap producing an irregular grid that is not wholly rectilinear. The pieces of writing paper were glued when wet onto the canvas surface, which accounts for the wrinkled surface quality. This gridded paper collage is then overlaid with a repetitive, biomorphic design drawn by hand in blue ink, which at close range is revealed to reference a racist and outdated minstrelsy idea of blackface physiognomy: a miniscule pair of rubbery lips, repeated thousands of times and loosely following the lines of the paper.
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