Kelley Walker

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: The work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some minor wear to all four corner tips. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"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."

The artist in conversation with Bob Nickas in: Exhibition Catalogue, Grenoble, Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Kelley Walker, 2008, p. 75

Kelley Walker’s Untitled plays with our accepted notions of appearance and reality, wittily subverting preconceived concepts of interior against exterior as well as that of painting versus photography. Depicting various sections of vertical and horizontal brick walls conjoined through means of a New York Times collage, Untitled encourages the viewer to consider the myriad possible meanings inherent in an everyday object: the brick, elevated by Walker to the status of artwork in the manner of a Duchamp readymade.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1969, Walker moved to New York in the mid-1990s, and the urban environment in which he lives and works is a clear source of inspiration for this series of works featuring brick walls, one of his most exciting recent artistic innovations. Digital media plays a key role in the creation of his works, and Untitled was put together through skillful manipulation of scanning and Photoshop techniques. The process is a painstaking one: Walker commences by scanning each single brick and saving the corresponding scans in Photoshop, where the artist proceeds to ‘build’ up the bare blocks of the wall. Colour tones are then introduced through silkscreens, one each for the four colours which make up every form of modern printed matter that can be viewed on a daily basis: black, cyan, magenta and yellow. Walker refers to the artistry involved in creating each unique image of bricks: “I don’t use an offset machine that applies the ink with equal and calibrated pressure as is standard in the commercial printing of process colours. Instead, I print the silkscreens on canvas with uneven, uncalibrated hand pressure. This results in a mostly off-colour photographic image, with infinite unseen variations” (the artist in conversation with Bob Nickas in: Exhibition Catalogue, Grenoble, Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Kelley Walker, 2008, p. 75). Untitled features a striking palette of predominately blue and lilac tones reminiscent of a lamp-lit wall by night, with sharp shadows suggested by the darker area of blue to the left hand side of the wall.

The inclusion of The New York Times serves as a unifying focal point for the image, as well as placing the work within its wider social and political context; parallels can be drawn with On Kawara’s Date Paintings, in which the artist places a copy of that particular day’s newspaper in a box to accompany the completed image. Yet whilst On Kawara’s choice of newsprint relates very specifically to particular places and dates, Walker’s choice is guided more by the artist’s feelings and emotions, introducing an element of renegade excitement to the work: “The collaged newspaper and magazine pages… help to inspire in myself – and, I imagine, in other viewers – an impulse to lash out or cut the canvas, to graffiti it” (the artist citied in: Ibid., p. 76). Untitled thus serves as a form of blank canvas in in its own right, indirectly referencing the spray-paint creations of graffiti artists that adorn the walls of urban areas throughout the world, further enhancing the illusion of reality. An image of urban symmetry at its most aesthetically pleasing and graceful, Untitled reveals the remarkable beauty of the apparently quotidian, whilst ultimately forcing the viewer to question and confront the very nature of the visible world.