Inspired by her trip to Palm Springs in August 2015, Caroline Walker’s Indoor Outdoor debuted during the exhibition The Racquet Club, her first solo show with GRIMM gallery in Amsterdam. Walker used two locations in Palm Springs – a private house and a hotel – to create a series of works which paint the mysterious lives of women who occupy the modernist villas of the Californian desert city. Combining the visual source imagery from on-site photoshoots, found imagery, memory and imagination, Walker’s paintings capture the fictional days of her unnamed inhabitants lounging by the poolside. The paintings provide a voyeuristic view of their lifestyle, executed with a sense of cinematic desolation reminiscent of the great American realist painter, Edward Hopper. This highly cinematic quality is particularly poignant in the present series, and Walker chose the location specifically for the purpose of exploring the dramatic, narrative quality of her work. Describing her decision, she said, “It wasn’t just these sun-kissed pools of California that were interesting to me. It was about places that represented artificiality, the set and constructing narrative” (Caroline Walker quoted in: Caroline Walker and Marco Livingstone, Picture Window – Caroline Walker, London, 2018, p. 251).

A city once developed for Los Angeles’s upper class and Hollywood’s biggest stars, Palm Springs in particular is famous for its bright white Modernist villas with full height glazing looking out over turquoise pools and glistening grass. Speaking of the mid-century modern design and architecture of the city, Walker said: “I like the way that kind of architecture split up the space of the canvas. And also it blurs the line between public and private because of these huge plate-glass windows… So much of my work has always reflected my interest in a voyeuristic gaze, or those boundaries between public behaviour and private space, or between private behaviour in public space” (Caroline Walker quoted in: Ibid, p. 249). Indoor Outdoor is a voyeuristic snapshot of a woman leisurely lying down on a sofa, the warm orange glow of the lamp dividing the interior space from the cool air of the desert night. The thin washes of translucent oil paint create a sense of motion, as if caught in a film still. In this blurred snapshot, people, time and place are all ambiguous with infinite narrative potential – the woman could be a housekeeper enjoying the quiet moment before the break of dawn, or a tired actress relaxing in the evening after a long day of shooting. Indoor Outdoor is not only pictorially, spatially and psychologically complex, but captivating in its mysterious allure.

Born in 1982 in Dunfermline, Scotland, Walker currently lives and works in London. Walker attended Glasgow School of Art before completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, London, and has had solo exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 2018; the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham and KM21, The Hague, 2021; as well as the Fitzrovia Chapel, London. Having received widespread critical recognition over the past decade, her works are represented in important collections around the world including KM21 Kustmuseum, The Hague, The UK Government Art Collection, London, National Museum Wales, Cardiff and Pérez Art Museum Miami.