Galerie Sara Lily Perez opens exhibition on Ellen Banks artworks

Galerie Sara Lily Perez will host an exhibition titled Reading Music in Berlin from 27 November 2026 to 21 January 2027.

The show features the work of American artist Ellen Banks, who spent more than 30 years translating musical scores into visual art. Banks began her career as a classical pianist before shifting to painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston.

In 1981, she started a project to interpret the structural DNA of compositions by musicians such as Chopin, Bartók, Clara Schumann, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington. Instead of listening to the music, she used sheet music as an architectural blueprint to create geometric paintings. She converted elements like key signatures and note values into chromatic grids and rhythmic intervals. The exhibition includes approximately two dozen works produced between the late 1990s and the 2010s.

These pieces consist of layered encaustic paintings, circular tondo canvases, and mixed-media compositions on wood. The Ellen Banks Archive in Spandau, which has preserved her legacy since 2022, collaborated on the show. This display follows a 2025 retrospective and serves as an intimate look at her method of mapping modern compositions through paint.