| Bird in Hand | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Ellen Gallagher |
| Year | 2006 |
| Medium | Oil paint, ink, paper, polymer, salt and gold leaf on canvas |
| Location | Tate Modern, London |
Bird in Hand is a 2006 painting by Ellen Gallagher. It is in the collection of the Tate Modern in London, England in the United Kingdom.
The mixed media painting depicts a Black pirate-like figure with a wooden leg and long hair. The figure has an alien-like face and wears a long coat, belt, a puffy, frilly white shirt, and a pair of blue pants. Holding a green parrot in its hand, the figure appears to be standing underwater, on seaweed, surrounded by a coral reef.
Gallagher produced the piece at her studio in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The painting was acquired by the Tate in 2007 as a gift from an anonymous donor. [1] The painting was exhibited at the Tate as part of a solo retrospective of Gallagher's work in 2013 titled "Ellen Gallagher: AxME". [2]
According to Gallagher, the bird that the figure is holding has "just been caught" and that the name of the painting comes from the feeling experienced by when a person holds a bird too tight in their hand. Tate Modern's Alice Sanger interpreted the painting as being representative of the Atlantic slave trade that stemmed from Cape Verde, where Gallagher's father is from. The use of salt in the painting represents the salt mining that was a major industry in the region. Sanger also suggests that the painting represents a slave turned pirate. [1]
Metro s Amy Dawson described the work's complex amount of paint, gold leaf and mixed media as being "intricate" and part of the artist's fantastical conception of a black Atlantis, populated by the descendants of slaves who perished during the Middle Passage." [3]
Dame Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.
Christopher Ofili, is a British painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He was Turner Prize-winner and one of the Young British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working in Trinidad and Tobago, where he currently resides in the city of Port of Spain. He also has lived and worked in London and Brooklyn.
George Claude Leon Underwood was a British artist, although primarily known as a sculptor, printmaker and painter, he was also an influential teacher and promotor of African art. His travels in Mexico and West Africa had a substantial influence on his art, particularly on the representation of the human figure in his sculptures and paintings. Underwood is best known for his sculptures cast in bronze, carvings in marble, stone and wood and his drawings. His lifetime's work includes a wide range of media and activities, with an expressive and technical mastery. Underwood did not hold modernism and abstraction in art in high regard and this led to critics often ignoring his work until the 1960s when he came to be viewed as an important figure in the development of modern sculpture in Britain.
Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.
African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world where the Black diaspora is found, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".
Philip Guston was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. "Guston worked in a number of artistic modes, from Renaissance-inspired figuration to formally accomplished abstraction," and is now regarded as one of the "most important, powerful, and influential American painters of the last 100 years." He frequently depicted racism, antisemitism, fascism and American identity, as well as—especially in his later most cartoonish and mocking work—the banality of evil. In 2013, Guston's painting To Fellini set an auction record at Christie's when it sold for $25.8 million.
Louise Lawler is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York City. Lawler’s work has focused on photographing portraits of other artists’ work, giving special attention to the spaces in which they are placed and methods used to make them. Examples of Lawler's photographs include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum, paintings on the walls of an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed in a gallery, and sculptures in a gallery being viewed by spectators.
Amy Sillman is a New York-based visual artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation. Her work draws upon art historical tropes, particularly postwar American gestural painting, as both influences and foils; she engages feminist critiques of the discourses of mastery, genius and power in order to introduce qualities such as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews, Frieze, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting" and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures." Critic Phyllis Tuchman described Sillman as "an inventive abstractionist" whose "messy, multivalent, lively" art "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction."
Bird-in-Hand or Bird in Hand may refer to:
Fred Wilson is an American artist of African-American and Caribbean heritage. He received a BFA from Purchase College, State University of New York. Wilson challenges colonial assumptions on history, culture, and race – encouraging viewers to consider the social and historical narratives that represent the western canon. Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1999 and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 2003. Wilson represented the United States at the Biennial Cairo in 1992 and the Venice Biennale in 2003. In May 2008, it was announced that Wilson would become a Whitney Museum trustee replacing Chuck Close.
The Weeping Woman is a series of oil on canvas paintings by Pablo Picasso, the last of which was created in late 1937. The paintings depict Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress and muse. The Weeping Woman paintings were produced by Picasso in response to the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War and are closely associated with the iconography in his painting Guernica.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British painter and writer, of Ghanaian heritage. She is best known for her portraits of imaginary subjects, or ones derived from found objects, which are painted in muted colours. Her work has contributed to the renaissance in painting the Black figure. Her paintings often are presented in solo exhibitions.
The Beloved is an oil painting on canvas by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), now in Tate Britain, London. Rossetti signed his initials and the date as "1865-6" on the bottom left of the canvas. It depicts the bride, or "beloved", from the Song of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible as she approaches her bridegroom, with her attendants.
Ellen Gallagher is an American artist. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in the permanent collections of many major museums. Her media include painting, works on paper, film and video. Some of her pieces refer to issues of race, and may combine formality with racial stereotypes and depict "ordering principles" society imposes.
Doll's Eyes is a 1992 painting by Ellen Gallagher. It is in the collection of the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Watery Ecstatic is a 2003 painting by Ellen Gallagher. It is in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri.
Afro Mountain is a 1994 painting by Ellen Gallagher. It is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York in the United States.
Paper Cup is a 1996 painting by Ellen Gallagher. It is in the collection of the Tate Modern in London, England in the United Kingdom.
Delirious Hem is a 1995 painting by Ellen Gallagher. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York in the United States.
Fons Americanus was a sculpture, taking the form of a functional fountain adorned with allegorical scenes and figures, created by American artist Kara Walker. The sculpture was housed in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall from late 2019 to early 2020, and was destroyed at the end of its time there.