Caroline Walker - Evening & Day Editions London Thursday, September 21, 2023 | Phillips

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  • In Caroline Walker’s Island Resort (2014), the poolside scene inspires instant serenity. Bathed in sunlight, framed by luscious greenery, two female figures dressed in matching pink bathing suits mirror each other, lying head-to-head at the edge of a swimming pool. With broad black sunhats shading their face, the women appear to exist in a state of perpetual relaxation. The tranquillity of the scene is enhanced by the symmetry of both the setting and the figures, who each trail an arm languorously in the water. As if time has stood still, they are suspended in guiltless pleasure and there is almost no indication of what may have come before or what is to follow.

     

    Working exclusively with women, Walker developed a very distinct approach to her compositions during this period. After finding the right location, she hired actresses and models to spend time in the space with her, photographing them in various poses before returning to her studio to work from these carefully staged images. Tellingly, this approach is not so dissimilar from Yorkshire-born David Hockney’s interest in the relationship between photography and draughtsmanship. His sun-soaked Californian studies of swimming pools are frequently invoked in discussions of Walker’s practice. Communicating a similarly languid sense of luxury, Walker’s pool paintings differ from Hockney’s in their distinct sense of narrative disquiet which undoubtably calls on cinematic reference points such as The Graduate (1967) and Jacques Deray's blistering La Piscine (1969).

     

    Widely regarded as one of the most technically accomplished figurative artists of her generation, Walker’s artworks privilege the female gaze. As Marco Livingstone writes, until "our own lifetimes, the world conveyed in paintings, and the way that women were represented in them, was primarily one conveyed through the minds, eyes and hands of men." This is why, he says, Walker’s art ‘is making such a vital, vigorous and affirmative contribution.’i Walker’s poolside scenes present female bathers in a vastly different way to former renditions of the subject, such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ The Turkish Bath (1863). Deeply imbued with the male gaze, Ingres’ composition presents the figures as fleshy objects of desire who flaunt their bodies and tantalise the viewer. They are fully nude, contorting their bodies to emphasise their womanly curves and entice the viewer. By contrast, Walker’s figures appear entirely self-possessed and oblivious to, or completely unphased by, the viewer’s gaze. In Ingres’ bath house composition, the spherical cropping of Ingres’ composition evokes a peephole and encourages the viewer to spy. This stands in stark contrast to Walker’s Island Resort, where the women are so content within the luxurious settings of their own reality that it insists on the spectator’s voyeuristic status, evoking the unnerving sense that one is an unnoticed intruder.

                                                    

    Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath, 1862, Louvre, Paris. Image: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Scala, Florence

    The present lot is from Walker’s series of lithographs entitled Initiations, published by Enitharmon Editions. It was based on the cinematic composition of her monumental 2014 painting, Threshold, which sold at Phillips in March 2023 for £927,000, setting a record auction price for the artist. As the title alludes to, the Initiations series was the artist’s first venture into lithography. "I’m always taken by surprise by some of the colours that are created in the process," Walker says. "It’s both exciting and challenging working out how to build up an image in this way, with just 6 or 7 colours." The lithographic process, which involves multiple plates of colours being methodically built-up layer-by-layer, lends itself extremely well to Walker’s vivid colours and painterly mark-making.

     ‘‘In terms of mark-making, lithography is the printmaking process closest to painting, but it still presented a completely different way of building an image. I had to consider how, through overlaying transparent layers of colour, I could… build complex scenes.’’
    —Caroline Walker

     

    i Marco Livingstone, ‘A Painter of Modern Life’, Picture Window, London, 2018, p. 9.

    • Provenance

      Enitharmon Editions, London
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      London, Enitharmon Editions, Initiations, 2014 (another from the edition illustrated in colour, unpaged).

    • Literature

      M. Sperling, 'Enigmas: Caroline Walker’s lithographs and paintings' in Apollo The International Art Magazine, August 2014 (illustrated in colour).

Property From a Distinguished Private European Collection

154

Island Resort

2014
Lithograph in colours, on wove paper, the full sheet.
S. 41.8 x 59.5 cm (16 1/2 x 23 3/8 in.)
Signed and numbered 9/25 in pencil, published by Enitharmon Editions, London, unframed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£6,000 - 8,000 ‡♠

Sold for £13,970

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Evening & Day Editions

London Auction 21 - 22 September 2023