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ANDREW
MUMMERY GALLERY - Richard Walker |
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Richard Walker 17
July - 23 August, 2003
A highly respected Glasgow-based artist, Walker was among the first to sound an alternative to the bombast of 1980s figuration, and he has steered a cogent course for painting alongside the neo-conceptualism of many of his contemporaries. Returning consistently to direct observation, Walker has frequently depicted the immediate surroundings of his own studio. The present show is devoted to this subject matter, which at one level announces the self-reflexive nature of the artist's endeavour. These are works in which painting is seen in the process of painting itself. At the same time Walker's paintings explore the 'real' visible world, delighting in all its physical and metaphorical complexity. Light itself, a perrennial concern for visual artists, is profoundly important to these works - light and shadow revealing and concealing objects, describing and obscuring the environment, orientating us in space. Order and chaos, and the sometimes disturbing transitions from recognisable identity to indeterminacy, are faced with a disabused (yet not disillusioned) realism. Numerous art-historical precedents inform the work, from Vermeer to Corot to Vuillard to Nicolas de Stael. The militantly modest figuration of the American painter Fairfield Porter is an important affinity for Walker, In these recent paintings the artist makes a quiet, but resolute manifesto for the continuing urgency of 'sur-le-motif' painting and the investigation and celebration of what it is to be conscious in our world. Richard Walker was born in Cumbernauld, Scotland in 1955. He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1973-77. Solo exhibitions have included those at Berwick Gymnasium, Berwick upon Tweed (2000); the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (1999) and the Mappin Gallery, Sheffield (1996)
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63
Compton Street, London EC1V 0BN
