At the end of August, an exhibition New Position in British Painting opened at the Olomouc Telegraph, providing an insight into contemporary British painting through five artists representing different approaches emerging in the British Isles. One of the female representatives in the five is Caroline Walker, a representative of the new realism and feminist movement in art.
Caroline Walker was born in 1982 in Dunfermline, Scotland. She received her BA in painting from the Glasgow School of Art. She then moved to London, where she gained an MA from the Royal College of Art. She was inspired by the people on the streets of London, whom she began to capture in their natural environment and behaviour. The artist currently lives in Cornwall where she has her own studio as well as a gallery. Caroline has had a large number of solo and group exhibitions. Recent exhibitions include Home (2018) at the University of Essex, Colchester, and A Woman Sewing (2019) at GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam. Also of interest was an exhibition entitled Janet (2020) at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. Here, Walker presented works with themes of her loved ones, her home and domestic activities. There were three exhibitions during 2021 - in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States. In 2022 it was three exhibitions again, this time in the UK, such as Lisa at London's Stephan Friedman Gallery.
Walker employs a method of realistic representation in his work, imbuing the paintings with a strong atmosphere through colour (vibrant and intense, as well as subtle and muted) and light, but also a certain weight through his choice of subject matter. The way of looking at the depicted scenes can be described as voyeuristic - he lets us secretly peer into the rooms through windows, from behind various objects or views from above and afar. This, together with the often chosen dimensional format, creates the impression that the viewer is really in the role of the hidden observer and can enter the picture and become part of this completely natural reality. This is probably the most significant reason for the appeal of Caroline's works - the possibility to look into another person's life and enter it unobserved. Caroline Walker's predominant subject is women, captured in situations of everyday life, at work (often focusing on overlooked female occupations such as beauty salons, nail studios, hotels...), but also in more intimate moments. Indeed, it is also the motif of motherhood - women experiencing its beauty, in a tender embrace with their child, but also its difficulties: pregnancy, night cries and endless fatigue. The starting point for many of these works are photographs, which she often secretly creates and then processes. The images of women in private and public spaces are often a reflection of the social, cultural, racial or economic situation that affects their lives in different ways and intensities. After moving to Cornwall, she was also inspired by the local beautiful countryside and the wildlife within it, which captivated her and fuelled her imagination for further work. Like the rest of the world, Caroline was influenced by the Covid-19 pandemic and without the opportunity to travel, she turned even more to nature, the sea and the open landscapes of Cornwall, producing a series of landscape paintings around 2020.
Eight works have been selected by curator Jane Neal for the exhibition New Posture in British Painting, which is allocated one corner of the gallery's exhibition space and a large number of which are in the collection of Robert Runták. One such painting is a striking and largest depiction titled Birthday Party from 2017. It is one of two canvases in the exhibition that depicts a room set up for a birthday party. Here we see several figures in a very casual stance - again, a voyeuristic mode of representation is employed, as if the observer is peering through the glass into the room while he himself remains hidden somewhere in the front of the house. The painting draws the viewer in with its warm colouring of the beige surfaces, but also with its delicate lighting.
Four studies also date from the same year - Study for Swimming Sessions II, Landscapes I, Study for Frosting I, Study for Structure - executed in oil on paper. In all of them, one can see some of the aforementioned features of Caroline's work, such as the thematization of women, scenes from everyday life, the voyeuristic way of looking into a painting, and the work with colour and light, evoking an atmosphere... The second large canvas in this exhibition is a work from 2020 entitled Hanging Out His Overalls, Early Afternoon, May, in which Walker thematizes a very ordinary scene from everyday life - a woman standing in the middle of her backyard just hanging her work overalls on the clothesline. The scene is completed by several buildings, a large trash can in the foreground and the large branches of a conifer tree, which again creates a hiding place for the viewer's secret observation. Here Caroline Walker creates a certain contrast between the size of the chosen format and the ordinariness, even banality, of the chosen scene, executed in a realistic manner. However, this strange contradiction is again more engaging. Then, from 2020, there is also a scene on the plate entitled Pocket Making, depicting a woman at work sewing. The most recent work, then, is a smaller oil on a plate from this year called Sarah Weighing Laurie I, depicting an intimate moment of a woman gently holding a newborn on a baby scale.
By Barbora Langová / Telegraph Gallery
