ELLEN BANKS

Ellen Banks (1938–2017) was an African American artist whose work sits at the intersection of abstract painting, musical structure and art-theoretical reflection. Her paintings are marked by a rigorously developed visual language in which music functions not as a subject but as structural source material.

Born in 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts, Banks grew up in a Baptist environment and received classical piano training from an early age. Music shaped her thinking lastingly, even though she consciously decided against a professional career as a pianist and turned instead to painting, which she understood as the place where creative independence was possible. After her bachelor's degree at the Massachusetts College of Art, she studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she later taught painting from 1974 to 1996.

In the early 1960s Banks began her career with figurative work before gradually moving towards an increasingly reduced, geometric abstraction. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1962 at the Dunbarton Galleries in Boston. A key work of this period, Midnight Sail (1969), entered the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From the 1970s she engaged intensively with modernism, in particular the ideas of De Stijl; in 1981–82 she studied in Amsterdam with Hans L. C. Jaffé, the historian of De Stijl.

A turning point came in 1981, when she began working systematically with musical scores. Banks developed her own method of visual transcription in which notes were assigned to particular colours. Her paintings always started from the written score rather than from a performance: bars, keys and the shape of the notation become grids, fields of colour and rhythms. Many titles name their source exactly. Over the following years she moved away from strict formal transfer towards a freer, more subjective language in which music acted as an impulse and catalyst. A major body of work from this phase is the Nocturnes series (1988), 19 acrylic paintings inspired by Frédéric Chopin's compositions of the same name, preserved in full in the estate.

In the 1990s and early 2000s Banks exhibited internationally and increasingly in Europe. Her 1992 exhibition at the former Amerika Haus in Berlin (today C/O Berlin) marked an important moment in her European reception and the beginning of her connection to Berlin. Represented among others by the New York gallerist Andre Zarre, she showed in numerous cities in North America and Europe, including Sofia, Amsterdam, Kraków and Warsaw. She lived in New York, Amsterdam and Paris. In her later years she sometimes appeared as Naomi Banks or Ellen Naomi, especially in a musical context, but continued to sign her paintings Ellen Banks.

Ellen Banks died on 18 May 2017. Under the terms of her will, her estate came to Berlin almost in its entirety; the Ellen Banks Archive in Spandau has been researching it since 2022.

“I often say that a musician takes the score and makes a performance, while I take the score and make a painting.” – Ellen Banks