Barricade

Known for portraying an almost voyeuristic intimacy, Walker renders her staged tableaux with a jewel-like gleam. In her rich, tonal images, she paints the lives of women with a cinematic poignancy. In Barricade a woman disappears through glass doors: is she fleeing, slipping away, or just returning home? Indeed, sensitive to the relation between fiction and real life, she cultivates a performativity in her canvases. For the artist, the cinema has long been one of her primary influences, and the Rococo folly of Cove is suffused with the drama of a stage set. Although her paintings may appear to reflect the world, Walker often works from photographs with the final canvas presenting a composite image. These are truthful fictions that meditate on the relationships between women and the physical spaces in which they pass their lives. Her work has been exhibited at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, the Southbank Centre, London, and the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham, among others; her solo presentation at KM21, The Hague, will open later this year.