Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965, Ellen Gallagher first won international attention at the Whitney Biennial in 1995. Gallagher's second exhibition at the Anthony d'Offay gallery surpasses all the promise of her first show here in 1996. In these grand new works, this young American artist continues to develop her private vocabulary of pictographs and characteristic use of a penmanship paper grid with increased confidence and deeper use of colour.

This new series of paintings, plus drawings and a sequence of prints, demonstrate her on-going concern with fake language and its private interiorness. Marks function as characters, though meanings are not confined within them and may be multiple. She uses repetition and revision as in musical notation, when with each return a phrase is slightly revised. This idea is central to Gallagher's cosmology: The characters are refigured, and through a refiguring of their language they experience their position anew. These accumulations can become a single character (as in the larger black paintings) or form spells ... through their consumption and digestion a performance is created.

Gallagher's extraordinary black paintings are a recent evolution in her work. In these paintings she seals her pictographs within an impenetrable, reflective surface of blackness, their outlines only decipherable in relief. The raised ridges of the surface are built up from layers of gesso or small pieces of rubber under skins of enamel paint. On one canvas thousands of tiny rubber forms make up an African headrest which floats inside an inverted hemisphere. Above it the rubber markings swirl and drift into another painting, converging to form a cactus and a tree, while the inverted hemisphere is transformed into several vaudeville bow-ties.

In the same room as this work, a drawing on a page torn from an old Ebony magazine features a loose grid of wigged ladies. By binding the models' faces with small black, plasticine hemispheres in the form of masks and blindfolds, Gallagher has conscripted these women to enter her private iconography.

Gallagher manipulates spatial relationships. She constructs intricate layers of materials and then punctures the skin. The work from a distance presents a compositional whole, yet requires our close scrutiny to read the miniature code structure. Drawn in, nose to canvas, we can no longer see the pattern of the whole, only the working details of obsession.

Ellen Gallagher lives and works in New York. Her work is currently included in the exhibition, 'Greater New York', in New York at PS1. Her last exhibition in this country was her solo show at the Ikon Gallery in 1998.

A publication is in production which will illustrate works in the show and others, with a text by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. Further details available during the show.