ELLEN GALLAGHER: FAST-FISH AND LOOSE-FISH
Gagosian is pleased to announce Ellen Gallagher: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
March 26–May 23, 2026
The exhibition features a cycle of three large-scale paintings that Gallagher produced between 2023 and 2026. Among these is a work featured in Gallagher’s exhibition All of No Man’s Land Is Ours at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2023–24).
Built upon canvas-mounted sheets of ruled, gridded paper that are stained in a vibrant pink hue, then layered with brilliantly colored, thickly impastoed pigment and incised palladium leaf, each of the Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish paintings employs a material abundance from which Gallagher’s playful meditations emerge. She takes a sculptural approach to her process, often working paintings from multiple positions. Exploding their compositional grids into groupings of vibrant lines and biomorphic shapes, she melds Post-Minimalist abstraction with imagined ocean-floor topographies and phantasmal worlds.
Gallagher has long been fascinated by the ocean. Her 2010 film installation Osedax, a collaboration with Edgar Cleijne, opens with a shipwreck off the coast of Rhode Island, interspersing animated imagery of a whale fall—the descent of a whale carcass to the abyssal depths of the ocean floor—within a radiant network of sea flora and fauna.
The Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish series similarly considers this phenomenon of slow decomposition becoming an intertwined regenerative ecosystem. The whales’ bodies support a profusion of life, from crustaceans and mollusks to bone-eating Osedax worms and specialized bacteria. Cross sections of the same bones suggest a shifting orientation within each picture plane, exploring the permeability between bodies and the environments they inhabit. For Gallagher, the seabed is inseparable from the historical marks of colonization and enslavement. In these works, tumbling caryatid forms inspired by African Fang sculptures join the whale bones amid strands of kelp and crinoid fossils.
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is an important source of inspiration for Gallagher. The series title, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, alludes to chapter 89 of the famously discursive novel, in which the author departs from the book’s primary narrative to define “fast-fish,” which have been claimed by a whaler, versus “loose-fish,” which remain free of such claims.