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 2, 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 (b. 1982, Dunfermline, UK) currently lives and works in London (UK), where she completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include: Nurture, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (UK), 2024; Women Observed, K11, Shanghai (CN), 2022; Lisa, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (UK), 2022; Caroline Walker: Birth Reflections, The Fitzrovia Chapel, London (UK), 2022; Windows, KM21, Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL), 2021; Women's work, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham (UK), 2021; and Nearby, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2021. Selected group exhibitions include: Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Hayward Gallery Touring, Arnolfini, Bristol; Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham (UK), 2024; Licked by the Waves | New Bathers in Art, Museum MORE, Gorssel (NL), 2024; My World, curated by Hans den Hartog Jager, Singer Museum, Laren (NL), 2024; The Painted Room, curated by Caroline Walker, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL), 2023; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (UK), 2023; PUBLIC PRIVATE, Pond Society, Shanghai (CN), 2023; Traces of Displacement, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (UK), 2023; Finding Family, Foundling Museum, London (UK), 2023; From Near and Far: Collage and Figuration in the Contemporary Age, curated by Katy Hessel, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (UK), 2022; the British Art Show 9, Wolverhampton; Manchester and Plymouth (UK), 2022; and A Female Gaze, Nottingham Castle, Nottingham (UK), 2022.

Walker is represented in a number of public collections including: Aïshti Foundation (LB); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (AU); Arts Council of England (UK); AkzoNobel Art Foundation (NL); The British Museum (UK); Dallas Museum of Art, TX (US); He Art Museum (CN); High Museum of Art, GA (US); Huamao Beijing Foundation (CN); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (US); ING Collection (NL); Jimenez-Colon Collection (PR); Kistefos Museum (NO); Kolon Group Collection (KR); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Museum Voorlinden (NL); National Museum Wales (UK); Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (US); The Rachofsky Collection, TX (US); Rosenblum Collection (FR); Royal College of Art (UK); Saatchi Collection (UK); Shetland Islands Council (UK); Sifang Art Museum (CN); The University of Cambridge (UK); The UK Government Art Collection (UK); University of Warwick (UK); Yale University Art Gallery, CT (US); and Woong Yeul Lee Collection (KR), among others.