For more than three decades, Ellen Banks translated musical scores into colour and form, from Chopin, Bartók and Clara Schumann to Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington. She worked with the written music rather than with sound, transforming bars, keys and notation into grids, fields of colour and rhythms.
Image gallery
Portrait of Ellen Banks New York 2010
Ellen Banks Bacewicz Rondino M2 n.d. Encaustic on canvas 60 x 60 cm
Ellen Banks Scherzo in G 2011. Encaustic on canvas on wood 122.5 x 91 cm
Ellen Banks Boy n.d. Encaustic on canvas 75.5 x 37.5 cm
Presented in collaboration with the Ellen Banks Archive, ‘Reading Music’ at the Sara Lily Perez Gallery brings around two dozen works from her Berlin estate to the west of the city.
“I often say that a musician takes the score and gives a performance, whilst I take the score and make a painting.” – Ellen Banks
Many of Banks’ titles specify their source precisely: Monk m22 p. 29 refers to bar 22 on page 29 of the score. The exhibition focuses primarily on the late 1990s and 2010s. It includes encaustic paintings in which wax and pigment convey the structure of the music, the round canvases of the Rondo series, large mixed-media works and small works on wood.
In accordance with the terms of her will, Banks’s estate was bequeathed almost in its entirety to Berlin and has been catalogued by the Ellen Banks Archive in Spandau since 2022. Following the retrospective “mood indigo” at the ZAK Centre for Contemporary Art, Spandau Citadel (2025), “Reading Music” is a curated selection organised in collaboration with the archive. A programme of talks in December and January will be announced separately.
About the artist
Ellen Banks (b. 1938, Boston; d. 2017) was initially trained as a classical pianist before turning to painting. She studied at the Massachusetts College of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she taught painting from 1974 to 1996, and in 1981–82 she studied in Amsterdam under the De Stijl historian Hans L. C. Jaffé. She lived in New York, Amsterdam and Paris. Her work is held in collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Addison Gallery of American Art. Her awards include the Prix de Paris (1967), a grant from the Ford Foundation (1979) and support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Radcliffe College (Bunting Fellowship).
- Opening: Friday 27 November, 6.00–9.00 pm, live music at 7.00 pm
- Gallery opening hours: Tue–Sat 11.00 am – 7.00 pm
