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Lot Essay
‘I think of the canvas as having a mimetic relationship not only to the wall the painting might be displayed on, but also to the structure of the bricks and cinder blocks in the urban cityscape of New York. Outside my studio window, I see various ways these buildings materials are used-structurally as well as decoratively, stacked both horizontally and vertically.’
—KELLEY WALKER’
A brick wall that seems to loom over or stretch past the viewer – the artist has specified it may be hung either portrait or landscape – Kelley Walker’s Untitled (2007) is at once a probing examination of the nature of picture-making and a study of the way in which urban space is mediated by images: an illusory vision of physical reality that evaporates into simulacrum. Walker’s path-breaking artistic practice scans individual bricks and then screenprints these images by hand over collages of newsprint and magazines – here a copy of the New York Times – in a playful, mischievous style that toys with the viewer’s sense of what the object is.
Walker’s artistic practice centres on his path-breaking use of digital scanners, conceptually playing with the interactions that take place between the visual and material. Here the artist uses the scanner to generate almost literal building blocks for his work, scanning individual bricks into his computer before laying them out into wall-like patterns in Photoshop. Yet, against this digital wall, a very human visual poetry emerges, the bricks themselves possessing an unexpected delicacy and individuality in their hand-printed variations of colour and texture. Having developed his pattern on his computer, the artist then subsequently prints the image with the four colour process deployed in everyday printing, separating the file into four silkscreens of cyan, magenta, yellow and black and applying one on top of the other, using manual pressure in order to produce a beautifully uneven colouring, rather than achieving the perfect mechanical replication of an offset machine. Where the first stage of Walker’s process automates what is usually a manual process, here he works by hand to mimic the technological production of images.
In this sense, the work metaphorises the way in which visual information saturates the contemporary urban space, using technology to reproduce the images that make up the wall itself, the ubiquity of the image infiltrating and becoming one with this emblem of physical urban space. In this it forms a fitting monument to the modern city itself: physically impressive and cannily streetwise, it is both haunted by the spectre of its own imagery, and beautifully, unavoidably shaped by a human presence.
—KELLEY WALKER’
A brick wall that seems to loom over or stretch past the viewer – the artist has specified it may be hung either portrait or landscape – Kelley Walker’s Untitled (2007) is at once a probing examination of the nature of picture-making and a study of the way in which urban space is mediated by images: an illusory vision of physical reality that evaporates into simulacrum. Walker’s path-breaking artistic practice scans individual bricks and then screenprints these images by hand over collages of newsprint and magazines – here a copy of the New York Times – in a playful, mischievous style that toys with the viewer’s sense of what the object is.
Walker’s artistic practice centres on his path-breaking use of digital scanners, conceptually playing with the interactions that take place between the visual and material. Here the artist uses the scanner to generate almost literal building blocks for his work, scanning individual bricks into his computer before laying them out into wall-like patterns in Photoshop. Yet, against this digital wall, a very human visual poetry emerges, the bricks themselves possessing an unexpected delicacy and individuality in their hand-printed variations of colour and texture. Having developed his pattern on his computer, the artist then subsequently prints the image with the four colour process deployed in everyday printing, separating the file into four silkscreens of cyan, magenta, yellow and black and applying one on top of the other, using manual pressure in order to produce a beautifully uneven colouring, rather than achieving the perfect mechanical replication of an offset machine. Where the first stage of Walker’s process automates what is usually a manual process, here he works by hand to mimic the technological production of images.
In this sense, the work metaphorises the way in which visual information saturates the contemporary urban space, using technology to reproduce the images that make up the wall itself, the ubiquity of the image infiltrating and becoming one with this emblem of physical urban space. In this it forms a fitting monument to the modern city itself: physically impressive and cannily streetwise, it is both haunted by the spectre of its own imagery, and beautifully, unavoidably shaped by a human presence.