Whitney Biennial 2022:  Quiet as It’s Kept

Floor 5

Ellen Gallagher develops her work as an archaeologist might, through a multi-part, simultaneous mode of embedding and extracting history and matter. The surface of her paintings, interwoven with stained penmanship paper that has become a kind of carrier for pigment, alongside other materials, evokes unsteady movement, unreliability, impossible alignments, the overlooked, and abstraction as a means of escape and possibility. The suggestion of water has deep historical resonances, from the violence of slavery and the slave trade to environmental catastrophe. Gallagher writes: “When is a place? The precious material of culture that, far from being left behind, sank to the bottom of the sea, suddenly resurfaced as a fossilized network. Irretrievable loss made insurgent memory. As if to say that culture is never only physical, nor only in the mind. In the face of relentless destructive attacks on a culture, a steady beat of anti-Blackness, what survives?”