Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller:Ellen Gallagher @ Hauser & Wirth.

Waves, tadpoles, ripples, dapples, and even what appears to be an octopus unfurling a curious tentacle. There can be no doubt, and the title confirms it, that Ellen Gallagher's 'Ecstatic Draught of Fishes' at the Hauser & Wirth gallery on Savile Row in Mayfair has what can only be described as an aquatic theme.

Despite, however, the washy sun soaked colours that Gallagher uses, the seas she paints are not tranquil ones. Like fellow African-American artist Kara Walker and the Detroit techno outfit Drexciya, Gallagher's work has a retrofuturistic aesthetic that remains, at all times, political. Elliptically political for sure - but political all the same.

Watery Ecstatic (2021) 

Inspired by three historical artworks about slavery (Peter Paul Rubens' 'The Miraculous Draught of Fishes', Gericault's 'The Raft of the Medusa', and Turner's 'Slave Ship'), Gallagher has worked up her own language of signs and signifiers to tell stories about the history of slavery and colonialism. A subject that, despite the BLM protests last year and the throwing of a statue of mass murderer Edward Colston into the harbour at Bristol, many Western societies are fearful of addressing.

That, I think, is because the scale of injustice is almost too horrific to contemplate. Some live in denial, some live in ignorance, and some, sadly, still cling on to the racist beliefs that allowed these crimes against humanity to happen. That is a textbook example of white privilege. You can be white and consider these crimes - but it's very easy not to. To be black is to be unable, without great difficulty, to ignore them.

Paradise Shift (2020)

Ecstatic Draught of Fishes (2021)

Ecstatic Draught of Fishes (2020)

Of course, a few paintings in a Mayfair gallery doesn't even begin to address this but small conversations grow into larger ones and the art world, as with the music and film world, has a role to play as surely as the worlds of politics and religion do in trying to understand what happened, why it happened and to make sure it can never happen again as well as realising that these events have affected how we, everyone, looks at race.

To return to Drexciya. They proposed an alternative history, or future, set in a submarine realm populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women who had been thrown off slave ships during the centuries long Middle Passage slave trade. Surviving beneath the waves long enough to give birth, their offspring adapted gills and proliferated as unidentified floating objects (UFOs).

It's a science fiction that, like all the best science fiction, is inspired by real life events. Gallagher's personal cosmology is full of floating sperms, proud African warrior princess heads, and unknowable deep sea creatures. She tries to make a dream out of a nightmare. That is the privilege of the artist and it is to the betterment of all of us that artists are able to ponder dark thoughts in ways that enlighten us. 

When I visited Ellen Gallagher's small exhibition at Tate Modern back in 2019 the message behind her work only really sunk in when I began to write about it afterwards. That left me hoping for a larger show, perhaps a full career retrospective, in one of London's larger galleries (the RA or the Hayward would do nicely). Ecstatic Draught of Fishes, which was even smaller than the Tate show, was not that exhibition but it did, prismatically and gradually, reveal another side to Gallagher's work. To view an object through water is to see it slightly obscured. The same is true of history, not least the history of colonialism. So perhaps it is highly appropriate that Ellen Gallagher's art also has this effect.

Watery Ecstatic (2021)