Caroline WalkerNashville Nights Trouper Show, 2024

Oil on board, framed

53.8 x 41.8 cm

About the artist

’s large canvases and intimate panels depict anonymous women in settings that blur the boundaries between public and private. Walker’s paintings are a lens for the everyday lives of women, and her portraits of diverse subjects tell their story through the spaces they inhabit. Each of Walker’s series conveys a distinct sense of time and place: from the undisguised luxury and class dynamics of beauty parlors in her series Painted Ladies (2017–18), to the humanistic portraits of refugees and asylum seekers in Home (2018), to scenes of anonymous women at work framed by the architecture of London in Service (2018–19), to the intimate domestic rhythms and emotional labor of early motherhood in Mothering (2021–25), and the artificial glow of British leisure culture in The Holiday Park (2024–25). In her recent artworks, Walker turns her focus to her immediate surroundings. She explores the boundary between being an observer – that is preserving the “objective” eye of an outsider – and magnifying the experience of a place which has become part of the fabric of her life. They are conceived as a reflection on community and how the anonymous people we encounter become characters in our own stories. Her subjects include a neighbor working in her garden, the local dry cleaner and a pharmacy sales assistant, all of whom are connected within a discrete area of the sprawling London metropolis. Walker describes small movements of daily existence and encapsulates the corners of life which are often overlooked but nonetheless vital, written and erased from history over and over again. They also serve as a kind of self-portrait by recording the artist’s journey through the places she frequents. Walker has received wide acclaim for her portrayals of women as works of social commentary, although it is her ability to distill viewpoints from familiar settings and her talent as a colorist that first impact viewers of her paintings. The complexities of her subjects’ lives filter through to the surface and coalesce in images that both fulfill the senses and speak to poignant moments of human experience. As a cohesive body of work, Walker’s paintings explore the performance of gender identity, femininity, and question the norms of depicting women and the female form across a range of socio-economic contexts. Caroline Walker was born in 1982 in Dunfermline, Scotland (UK) where she now lives and works again. Walker received a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art (UK) in 2004 and an MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art (UK) in 2009.

About the artist

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