Ellen Banks - mood indigo

Since 2022, a team has been dedicated to working through her legacy. This exhibition is an insight into the work on her estate and a tribute to an extraordinary artist.



With an extensive retrospective, the ZAK Center for Contemporary Art presents the painterly work of the African-American artist Ellen Banks (1938-2017).


Under the title "mood indigo", the exhibition brings together around 100 works from almost all of the artist's creative phases alongside documents and photos from her personal estate. Starting from figurative beginnings, the artist developed a free abstract oeuvre in the 1970s, which later increasingly led to a structural-analytical examination of music, or more precisely, musical compositions.


Ellen Banks lived and worked in New York until her death in 2017, alongside cities such as Amsterdam and Paris, where she was part of a vibrant scene of artists and musicians. Her enthusiasm for music, especially jazz, had a decisive influence on her painting from the 1980s onwards.


On the basis of written musical compositions, she began to develop an independent painterly transformation of notes into colors. At first glance, this resulted in constructively concrete pictures, which, however, represent painted notations. She questioned and grasped the order and rhythm of music and translated them into a precise visual language that explored the visual relationships of written music on a formal and chromatic level: "I often say that a musician takes the score and makes a performance, while I take the score and make a painting".


Using various techniques, he created an extensive oeuvre, which was brought to Berlin almost in its entirety due to a testamentary disposition and has been viewed, documented and analyzed by a young team of curators in recent years. This meticulous research work has resulted in a comprehensive picture of an unusual artist at the interface between music and the visual arts. Archive materials, notes, sketches and photos from the estate open up new perspectives on Ellen Banks' oeuvre - between preservation and reconsideration, between memory and transmission. An essential step towards making Ellen Banks' artistic legacy visible and anchoring her works permanently in cultural memory.


Curated by Mia-Phyllis Liefer, Maxim Marais, Oliver Gudzowski and Patricia Bonsaver.


In collaboration with Galerie Spandow / Katrin Germershausen