Caroline Walker - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Washing Line, Early Morning, May, 2020, comes from Caroline Walker’s most personal series, Janet, named for the artist’s mother. The works depict Janet engaged in a variety of domestic tasks, capturing her private world in the artist’s childhood home, honoring the invisible labor performed by women. Rendered in exquisite detail, Walker elevates women’s domestic work through painting. The artist has long been interested in the theme of oft-overlooked female labor, inspired to paint the uncelebrated roles of working women, from cleaners to nail technicians. 

     

    The Janet series represents a more personal connection to the subject and increased access into this world: for a year, Walker took hundreds of photographs of her mother, which she used as the basis for the series. The works were painted during Britain’s stay-at-home orders in 2020, a time when the artist couldn’t physically be with her mother, so the paintings represent an alternative form of connection between mother and daughter during a time of separation. Walker describes working on this series as “one of the most pleasurable periods of working I’ve ever had.” She dedicates her monograph for the series to her mother, expressing: “Mum, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed spending so much time with you in the studio, especially when many of these paintings were made in a period where it wasn’t possible to be with you in person.”ii

     

     

    In Washing Line, Early Morning, May, Janet spreads a pristine wide white linen sheet on the washing line. The scene is captured with the high level of detail typically reserved for history paintings. In such a light, the task becomes heroic, the painting an act of ennobling the routine of hanging laundry. Walker’s interest in representing people living their daily lives follows in the tradition of artist’s like Mary Cassatt, who was fascinated by the private lives of women, and Dutch Golden Age masters like Johannes Vermeer, whose domestic interiors captured household maintenance. In the present example Walker depicts a moment with such specificity—from the movement of the sheets to the gesture and posture of the artist’s mother—that the viewer feels an acute awareness of the scene as a vivid moment in time. 

     

    i Caroline Walker in Janet, exh. cat., Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, 2020, n.p.

    ii Ibid.

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Ingelby Gallery, Edinburgh
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Edinburgh, Ingleby Gallery, Caroline Walker: Janet, October 3–December 19, 2020, pp. 104–107 (illustrated)

    • Literature

      "In the studio with... Caroline Walker," Apollo, April 15, 2021, online (studio view illustrated in preliminary state)

322

Washing Line, Early Morning, May

signed, titled and dated "WASHING LINE, EARLY MORNING, MAY Caroline Walker 2020" on the reverse
oil on linen
78 3/4 x 104 3/8 in. (200 x 265 cm)
Painted in 2020.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024