One of the most prominent and controversial artists today, Kara Walker emerged on the international scene with several solo and group exhibitions in the mid-1990s, when this present example was first executed. Utilizing cut-paper silhouettes produced on a life-sized scale in a reduced color palette, typically black and white shapes against a white background, Walker expands on a popular eighteenth and nineteenth century parlor game in which genteel ladies decorated their boudoirs with similar silhouette figures. Connected to the low arts, this medium was also associated with caricature and with the pseudoscience of physiognomy (a belief that facial features provide insight into a range of psychological and moral characteristics). Walker turns this decorative art form into a powerful medium by which she can address the repressive perversions of antebellum America.

The lurid scene depicted here involving two decapitated bodies kneeling in a declaration of piety or forgiveness, their respective heads, and pools of blood is both incredibly resolved and simultaneously impossible to fully comprehend. With her figures combining sublime beauty in their effervescent silhouettes and disturbing content, the scene created by Walker describes a world full of mischief, violence, scatology and sensuality. The lady’s head gazes up underneath the dress of her own truncated body in an expression of seeming astonishment, while the gentleman’s eyes still seem transfixed by her elevated body even as his own clasped hands and kneeling form seemingly beg for redemption.

Walker has created a body of work that has sparked numerous reactions ranging from critical acclaim to outrage for its startling imagery and unflinching portrayal of often painful and disturbing subject matter. Choosing bizarre yet intriguing, and often grotesque, images rooted in stereotypes, Walker comments on the system of oppression and subjugation in antebellum America and its legacy in the American consciousness.