GALERIE SLP Presents: Ellen Banks - Reading Music

27.11. - 21.01.2027

OPENING RECEPTION: NOVEMBER 27, 2026 | 6–9 P.M. | FREE

Galerie Sara Lily Perez presents paintings by the American artist Ellen Banks (1938–2017) from her estate in Berlin. For more than three decades, Banks translated musical scores – from Chopin, Bartók and Clara Schumann to Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington – into colour and form.

From 1981, Banks worked from the written music rather than from listening. Bars, keys and the shape of the notation become grids, fields of colour and rhythms. Many titles name their source exactly: Monk m22 pg. 29 refers to bar 22 on page 29 of the score, Chopin #54 Scherzo m17 E to bar 17.

The exhibition brings together around two dozen works, mainly from the late 1990s and the 2010s: encaustic paintings in which wax and pigment carry the structure of
the music, the round canvases of the Rondo series, large mixed-media works, and small works on wood.