Maggie Ellis: Chaos Bewitched

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Chaos Bewitched, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Maggie Ellis. This marks Ellis's fourth solo exhibition at Charles Moffett and her first since 2023. Taking its title from a phrase used in Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick, Chaos Bewitched brings together 20 new paintings that teem simultaneously with life and rot. Space is dense with figures both corporeal and ghostly, with the living often indistinguishable from the dead. The resulting compositions comprise a witches' brew that conjures the painter's eternal question: What if?

Raised in small-town Georgia, Ellis inherited a Southern Gothic sensibility that continues to animate her work. As a scuba diver in the springs, rivers, and caverns of North Florida, where she also camped and painted en plein air along the Withlacoochee River, she found another point of view from which to observe the world: one seen through a filmy haze of water. To be submerged in a space where humans are not meant to be is to live with a constant threat of danger, and Ellis has carried the close observation of those experiences into her paintings. A lifelong student of painting, she has recently spent time traveling to Venice, Paris, Madrid, Toledo, and Amsterdam to study works by El Greco, Rembrandt, Goya, Gericault and more. With a voracious appetite for art history, she is forever exploring paint’s potential, the seemingly infinite ways it can be used, manipulated, and applied. Today, she turns that observational eye toward the millions of strangers moving through her adopted home of New York, blending them with characters from her imagination and landscapes from her past.

Nothing is off limits for Ellis’s visual repertoire. A panoply of characters, styles, and ghosts of painting eras past crowd together: structured, Renaissance compositions bleed into over-the-top caricature, and vivid sunsets turn into garish reflections on the water. In Thanksgiving, a man at a dinner party leans casually against the table, his face half flesh and half skull. In Self Portrait in Swamp, a woman's head emerges from the water, her skin mottled blue and green like pond scum. Elsewhere, there are scaly mermaid girls, a cemetery gathering of spirits and pets, and Citi Bike riders speeding down a wet Lower Manhattan alley. In Rapture of the Deep, a take on Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, unfortunate souls, small and falling, are swallowed by vast waves beneath a churning red and black sky.

Ellis begins each painting without a predetermined sense of space. She pours, scrapes, and maneuvers oil paint in a series of abstract moves, and these underpinnings set a dramatic tone, evoking the churning, grotesque water or textured landscapes that ultimately anchor her compositions. Meaningfully for the artist, this method injects unpredictability into her paintings from the start, a reminder that she is never fully in control of what emerges.

Throughout Chaos Bewitched, fantasies threaten to turn bad. Ellis's natural feel for narrative and her own personal mythologies tease an allegory, yet allegories dissolve in the chaos of dreams, and circumstances can turn on a dime. What is horrifying in one moment becomes enchanting in the next. Both tender and unnerving, Ellis's paintings invite us to linger in that uncertain space, where the line between the beautiful and the grotesque, the living and the dead, remains an elusive boundary.