Maggie Ellis: Strange Strangers
16 October - 20 November 2021
Charles Moffett
511 Canal Street, NYC
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See checklist linked below for artwork info. For install shots and studio images, credit is included in the file title.
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A prewar apartment building façade punctuated by a man watching porn on a huge TV with his window open; a group of Upper East Side 'Peloton moms' hosting an outdoor pizza party as a man picks his genitals behind them and a passerby dusts them with a cotton candy vape cloud; and a blue-hued couple dining outdoors in subzero temperatures are just several scenes from Maggie Ellis (b. 1991, Atlanta; MFA Hunter 2017)’s new series of 13 voyeuristic, large-scale oil paintings of NYC that will be on view in a solo show, Strange Strangers, at Charles Moffett.
“The figures themselves are unrealistic, exaggerated just enough to become varying degrees of preposterous, bizarre, grotesque, and camp,” says Ellis. “It’s a rejection of my upbringing and a protest of the rules of womanhood I was raised under in the rural South, subverting taught notions of being pretty, lady-like, and polite. I’m expressing my right to be irreverent, unruly, and crude as a woman.”
Ellis, who has lived in New York for six years, describes of her experience: “On a crowded subway I feel nurtured (and disgusted), a singular body being held in a sea of bodies. The train car serves as a dirty womb carrying all of us, speeding through dark mysterious cavities under the city. The perspective of a stranger has always been my vantage point.”
Influences include the visual language of 1990s Nickelodeon, as well as the compositional themes of 16th-century Dutch and Flemish drawings (particularly Bruegel), the interpretive qualities of Alice Neel, and the humorous approach of seminal American cartoonist R. Crumb. Particularly in Ellis’ paintings that contain a large number of people, it’s hard to ignore the compositional and thematic influence of the German Expressionists of the Weimar Republic, such as George Grosz and Otto Dix.
Read more in the above-linked press release.
A preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download high-resolution image files. Image reuse must be with credit to Charles Moffett, unless otherwise noted in the file title.
