Ellen Gallagher with Edgar Cleijne: A law… a blueprint… a scale is the first exhibition in Spain by the internationally acclaimed American artist Ellen Gallagher. Spanning two decades of the artist´s career, it will include paintings, works on paper as well as three film installations created in collaboration with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne.
Curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Centro Botín’s Director of Exhibitions and the Collection, and Benjamin Weil, Director of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian’s centre for modern art, the exhibition invites the visitors to submerge themselves under the ocean’s skin through an immersive itinerary that explores issues of race, identity and transformation, with reference to themes such as Modernist abstraction and marine biology.
Staged in Centro Botín’s expansive galleries overlooking the Santander Bay, located in the Cantabrian Sea – the coastal sea of the Atlantic Ocean that washes the northern shores of Spain – the artists’ aquatic and transformative aesthetics propose an active dialogue with the deep-sea waters and the organisms, stories and myths that inhabit them. Their works foreground their engagement to expose racial and environmental extractivism – the tragic memories of the transatlantic slave trade and the disappearance of ocean species – while reaffirming the resilience and changeability of all lifeforms.
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