Caroline Walker (b.1982)
Cove, 2014
Oil on board
Framed Dimensions -
35 x 33 x 4 cm
13 3/4 x 13 x 1 5/8 in
35 x 33 x 4 cm
13 3/4 x 13 x 1 5/8 in
Caroline Walker, Cove, 2014 Presenting a jewel-like, surrealist view of an interior, Cove (2014) is an intimate work related to Caroline Walker’s series of paintings shown in her exhibition ‘Set...
Caroline Walker,
Cove, 2014
Presenting a jewel-like, surrealist view of an interior, Cove (2014) is an intimate work related to Caroline Walker’s series of paintings shown in her exhibition ‘Set Piece’ in 2014. Renowned for her complex play with interior and exterior space – this work skillfully creates a picture window to an exterior within an interior. Though the exterior is in fact a wallpaper, it gives the impression of a surrealist scene with a single chair in front of the pyramids, the Parthenon, and palm trees. Working from a constructed cinematic scene which Walker created at the time including three female models (the three graces perhaps), she also produced several small scale paintings without figures. The space where she shot the photographic images was rented from Big Sky Studios at the time and it no longer exists. Only since 2010 the artist had been working with this specific process, as she has revealed in interviews, so in time this painting will be considered part of her early iconic work. In speaking about her process Walker states, ‘I understand more what it is that interests me about [these kinds of locations]. They’re so far removed from my current personal experience of domesticity that I see them as fantasy spaces into which I can project a narrative.’ In her 2016 large scale painting ‘Picture Window’ Walker paints a dining table with chairs looking out to the garden with a single female figure barely visible in the shrubbery. Though Walker is known for the voyeur gaze of women, disrupting the male centric narrative, there is also an esoteric excitement to a Walker with no figures. In it we feel the lonely warmth of an Edward Hopper empty shop painting or an interior by Scottish artist Francis Cadell, even the sumptuousness of Vuillard. That said, the brushstrokes and colour is very much a Walker through and through. Only one chair is fully rendered and the background is mixing place and time so there is an eeriness to the scene. Somehow the painter is able to create a sense of us returning to a long bygone era, or a future time when humans no longer exist. The use of brushwork is silky and gestural with some areas of impasto. The viewer is welcomed into the gem like painting, to sit in the chair, to respond to the wonders of the world, and yet at the same time there remains a discomfort to the lack of any people, the feeling of being lost in temporality and place in ‘Cove.’ It is this unease mixed with beauty which makes this a Caroline Walker to covet.
Cove, 2014
Presenting a jewel-like, surrealist view of an interior, Cove (2014) is an intimate work related to Caroline Walker’s series of paintings shown in her exhibition ‘Set Piece’ in 2014. Renowned for her complex play with interior and exterior space – this work skillfully creates a picture window to an exterior within an interior. Though the exterior is in fact a wallpaper, it gives the impression of a surrealist scene with a single chair in front of the pyramids, the Parthenon, and palm trees. Working from a constructed cinematic scene which Walker created at the time including three female models (the three graces perhaps), she also produced several small scale paintings without figures. The space where she shot the photographic images was rented from Big Sky Studios at the time and it no longer exists. Only since 2010 the artist had been working with this specific process, as she has revealed in interviews, so in time this painting will be considered part of her early iconic work. In speaking about her process Walker states, ‘I understand more what it is that interests me about [these kinds of locations]. They’re so far removed from my current personal experience of domesticity that I see them as fantasy spaces into which I can project a narrative.’ In her 2016 large scale painting ‘Picture Window’ Walker paints a dining table with chairs looking out to the garden with a single female figure barely visible in the shrubbery. Though Walker is known for the voyeur gaze of women, disrupting the male centric narrative, there is also an esoteric excitement to a Walker with no figures. In it we feel the lonely warmth of an Edward Hopper empty shop painting or an interior by Scottish artist Francis Cadell, even the sumptuousness of Vuillard. That said, the brushstrokes and colour is very much a Walker through and through. Only one chair is fully rendered and the background is mixing place and time so there is an eeriness to the scene. Somehow the painter is able to create a sense of us returning to a long bygone era, or a future time when humans no longer exist. The use of brushwork is silky and gestural with some areas of impasto. The viewer is welcomed into the gem like painting, to sit in the chair, to respond to the wonders of the world, and yet at the same time there remains a discomfort to the lack of any people, the feeling of being lost in temporality and place in ‘Cove.’ It is this unease mixed with beauty which makes this a Caroline Walker to covet.