Ellen Gallagher (b. 1965)

DeLuxe, 2004-2005, Ellen Gallagher’s explosive suite of sixty etchings individually adorned with glitter, gold leaf, coconut oil and even engraved with a tattoo machine, treats the subjects of femininity and race in America with caustic wit and revolutionary passion. The source material for DeLuxe is drawn from advertisements targeting black women, dating from the 1930s to the 1970s. The specific products illustrated in these ads are mostly comprised of a vast array of beauty products—especially those related to hair, such as wigs and pomade. The title of the work appears again and again, in various fonts and spellings, across the ads, its meaning further complicated and compromised with every repetition.

Of the many post-printing techniques that the artist applied to the sixty works that make up DeLuxe, perhaps the most distinctive is the use of plasticine, sculpted to resemble tribal masks or outrageous hairpieces, its application transforming the women of the advertisements into frightening parodies of black femininity and the prints into three-dimensional reliefs. As the historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes, “The disembodied minstrel ephemera she renders in ink, paint, rubber and plasticine—lips, eyes, etc.—Gallagher rescues these historically burdened signs from their original context and transmutes them into new forms” (R. D.G. Kelley, “Fugitives from a Chain Store,” Preserve, Des Moines, 2001, p. 12). Gallagher’s process, which at first glance can appear almost anarchic, can thus be considered a scathing means of liberating a long-entrenched, tragically disfigured identity. DeLuxe is regarded as one of the most important and multifaceted works that the artist has created to date.