Caroline Walker: The Holiday Park
GRIMM is pleased to announce The Holiday Park, a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by British artist Caroline Walker. The exhibition will be on view at the New York gallery from March 28 to May 3, 2025.
The Holiday Park is a new body of work by Caroline Walker that takes the activity led, family-friendly holiday park as its setting. A setting that is artificial yet familiar, posed for the purpose of elevating the leisure of guests and minimising their perception of labour. This environment, reproduced in the painted details highlights its confection, from the artificial glow of the amusement arcade to the uniformly uniformed staff, the wave patterned swimming pool tiles and the managed landscape. Adopting a more autobiographical approach to image-making that has become synonymous with the artist’s practice in recent years, the series looks to highlight the relationship between work and leisure, drawing out the sociopolitical conditions that construct each mode.
After a family break at one such resort in 2023, Walker recognised the potential in this microcosm. This highly constructed environment contained activities that had been the subjects of recent bodies of work: housekeeping, catering and the nurture and care of young children, while also alluding to the staged scenes that characterized earlier series. In collaboration with Parkdean Resorts, Walker and her family spent a week in July 2024 at two of their locations in the South of England. During this time she photographed women working in diverse roles across the site. Set against the branded backdrop of the resort, the resulting paintings document both her family’s experience as holidaymakers and serve as a record of the smoothly choreographed work of the women who made their holiday possible.
Tracing the artist’s enduring preoccupation with the rarely seen sites of women’s affective labour, each female subject appears to the viewer unaware that they are being observed. Whether depicted collecting children’s inflatable pool toys, performing as part of the evening entertainment or cleaning holiday cabins before the arrival of new guests, Walker’s subjects are engaged wholly with the job in hand. Rendered in vivid colour, the women’s hands are always busy. Their eyes never meet our gaze and in-so-doing they resist interpretation and the imposition of a singular narrative.
About the artist
Caroline Walker was born in 1982 in Dunfermline, Scotland (UK) where she now lives and works again. Walker received a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 2004 and an MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art in 2009.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Nurture, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (UK); Women Observed, K11, Shanghai (CN); Lisa, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (UK); A Female Gaze, Nottingham Castle, Nottingham (UK); Caroline Walker: Birth Reflections, The Fitzrovia Chapel, London (UK); Windows, KM21, Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Women's Work, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham (UK); Nearby, GRIMM, New York, NY (US).
Selected group exhibitions include: Good Mom/Bad Mom – Unraveling the Mother Myth, Centraal Museum, Utrecht (NL); Mama: From the Virgin Mary to Beyoncé, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (DE); A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (US); Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Hayward Gallery Touring, Bristol; Birmingham; Sheffield; Dundee (UK); Licked by the Waves | New Bathers in Art, Museum MORE, Gorssel (NL); My World, curated by Hans den Hartog Jager, Singer Laren Museum, Laren (NL); The Painted Room, curated by Caroline Walker, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); PUBLIC PRIVATE, Pond Society, Shanghai (CN); Traces of Displacement, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (UK); Finding Family, Foundling Museum, London (UK); British Art Show 9, Wolverhampton; Manchester; Plymouth (UK).
Walker is represented in a number of major public collections including: Aïshti Foundation (LB); Art Gallery of New South Wales (AU); Arts Council of England (UK); The British Museum (UK); Dallas Museum of Art (US); He Art Museum (CN); The Hepworth Wakefield (UK); High Museum of Art (US); Huamao Beijing Foundation (CN); The Hunterian (UK); Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (US); Kistefos Museum (NO); Kunstmuseum The Hague (NL); Museum of Fine Arts Houston (US); Museum Voorlinden (NL); National Galleries of Scotland (UK); National Museum of Wales (UK); The National Museum of Women in the Arts (US); Pallant House Gallery (UK); Pérez Art Museum (US); The Rachofsky Collection (US); Sifang Art Museum (CN); Tate (UK); The UK Government Art Collection (UK); The University of Cambridge (UK); University of Warwick (UK); and Yale University Art Gallery (US).
