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拍品专文
'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'
(K. Walker, quoted in Y. Aupetitalliot (ed.) Kelley Walker, exh. cat., MAGASIN Centre national d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, 2007, p. 76).
Visually absorbing in its palimpsest surface, Kelley Walker's Untitled from 2007 plays with the pictorial languages of low and high culture. One of the artist's celebrated 'brick paintings', Walker achieves the illusory quality of Untitled by conflating traditional image production with techniques from the digital age. In the 'brick paintings', the artist uses collaged elements from popular contemporary periodicals, in this case the Fall/Winter issue of VMan magazine, as a ground for the screen print, including the magazine's cover on the painting's verso. He then silk-screens images of scanned bricks on top of the appropriated image which ostensibly becomes the 'mortar' that holds the image together, lending the work a hyper-realism that raises questions surrounding production as well as what lies beyond the canvas' surface. Playing on modernist notions of the flat picture plane, in Walker's Untitled, any pictorial depth is refuted beyond the magazine cover which has been obfuscated by the brick wall, outside sources which subverts Clement Greenberg's espousal of an insular painterly medium. Indeed as Walker has elaborated on these works, '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' (K. Walker, quoted in Y. Aupetitallot (ed.) Kelley Walker, exh. cat., MAGASIN Centre national d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, 2007, p. 76).
Walker's 'brick paintings' build on long legacy of artist's engaging with their surroundings through a tension between representation and abstraction. Indeed they have much in common with Jasper Johns' flagstone imagery from the 1970s which re-imaged a wall that he had seen on a drive through Harlem one night. Walker highlighted Johns as one of his favourite artists with Interview magazine, undoubtedly finding resonance in the artist's explication to David Sylvester in 1965 that 'I'm interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality. I'm interested in things which suggest things which are...they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy' (J. Johns, quoted in D. Sylvester, 'Interview for the BBC, June 1965', in K. Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, New York 1996, pp. 113-121). Indeed 'Kelly Walker's bricks read as both an abstract pattern and an impenetrable wall' Jeffrey Deitch explains, 'Walker's 'brick paintings' propose another way to reconcile the opposing aesthetic directions of Pollock, Johns, and Warhol. They reference Pollock's nonhierarchical composition, Johns' engagement with the found abstraction of his flagstone pattern, and Warhol's abstraction of iconic images rendered with a mechanical printing technique' (J. Deitch, The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 6).
(K. Walker, quoted in Y. Aupetitalliot (ed.) Kelley Walker, exh. cat., MAGASIN Centre national d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, 2007, p. 76).
Visually absorbing in its palimpsest surface, Kelley Walker's Untitled from 2007 plays with the pictorial languages of low and high culture. One of the artist's celebrated 'brick paintings', Walker achieves the illusory quality of Untitled by conflating traditional image production with techniques from the digital age. In the 'brick paintings', the artist uses collaged elements from popular contemporary periodicals, in this case the Fall/Winter issue of VMan magazine, as a ground for the screen print, including the magazine's cover on the painting's verso. He then silk-screens images of scanned bricks on top of the appropriated image which ostensibly becomes the 'mortar' that holds the image together, lending the work a hyper-realism that raises questions surrounding production as well as what lies beyond the canvas' surface. Playing on modernist notions of the flat picture plane, in Walker's Untitled, any pictorial depth is refuted beyond the magazine cover which has been obfuscated by the brick wall, outside sources which subverts Clement Greenberg's espousal of an insular painterly medium. Indeed as Walker has elaborated on these works, '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' (K. Walker, quoted in Y. Aupetitallot (ed.) Kelley Walker, exh. cat., MAGASIN Centre national d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, 2007, p. 76).
Walker's 'brick paintings' build on long legacy of artist's engaging with their surroundings through a tension between representation and abstraction. Indeed they have much in common with Jasper Johns' flagstone imagery from the 1970s which re-imaged a wall that he had seen on a drive through Harlem one night. Walker highlighted Johns as one of his favourite artists with Interview magazine, undoubtedly finding resonance in the artist's explication to David Sylvester in 1965 that 'I'm interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality. I'm interested in things which suggest things which are...they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy' (J. Johns, quoted in D. Sylvester, 'Interview for the BBC, June 1965', in K. Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, New York 1996, pp. 113-121). Indeed 'Kelly Walker's bricks read as both an abstract pattern and an impenetrable wall' Jeffrey Deitch explains, 'Walker's 'brick paintings' propose another way to reconcile the opposing aesthetic directions of Pollock, Johns, and Warhol. They reference Pollock's nonhierarchical composition, Johns' engagement with the found abstraction of his flagstone pattern, and Warhol's abstraction of iconic images rendered with a mechanical printing technique' (J. Deitch, The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 6).