A t first viewing, Ellen Gallagher’s Untitled explicitly invokes minimalist forms, and yet close inspection reveals tactile interventions and meticulous hand-drawn motifs; contortions that satirize Minimalism’s piously clean lines. Ellen Gallagher came to prominence in the 1990's at a t.mes when artists were rejecting the overblown painterly gestures of the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980's in favor of creating a more intimate, and ideally more meaningful, dialogue with the viewer. Executed in 1998 during a highly politicized moment in the art world, Untitled subtly manifests sexual and racial politics. Gallagher injects narrative, symbolism, and African American history into the forms of conventional 1960s Minimalism.
Untitled belongs to a series of works from the early-mid 1990s which delicately draw reference to racist caricature, evoking what Gallagher refers to as the earliest American abstraction: the “disembodied spectra of minstrelsy”. (Ellen Gallagher quoted in A.J. Samuels, “Fish Freud, and Feminine Beauty in the Art of Ellen Gallagher”, Culture Trip, 2017, online) Gallagher uses facial and bodily features seen and deployed out of context as potent symbols. Amidst the serene white space of Untitled, Gallagher injects miniature renderings of overblown lips, a reference to the racial stereotype of the Black Minstrel, studding her image with "a kind of graphic sleight of hand…which teases viewers who approach her canvases across spacious contemporary galleries expecting to be carried off by the spiritual after-draft of the great transcendental winds of early modern abstraction.” (Robert Storr, Ellen Gallagher, 2001, p. 32). The experience of viewing Untitled is incredibly striking; the realm of “pure aesthetic delight promised from a distance by nearly monochrome vastness accented by filigree designs, is, on closer inspection, a semiotic briar patch". (Robert Storr, Ellen Gallagher, 2001, p. 32) Untitled masterfully evinces Gallagher’s compelling practice, confronting the history of Black representation and the ways that abstraction and minimalism are implicated by and embedded within issues of race and racism.
