GRIMM is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of Caroline Walker's Cashing Up (2022) by the High Museum, Atlanta, GA (US). This is the first acquisition of the artist's work by the museum.
Caroline Walker’s large canvases and intimate panels depict anonymous women in settings that blur the boundaries between public and private. Walker’s paintings are a lens for the everyday lives of women, and her portraits of diverse subjects tell their story through the spaces they inhabit. Each of Walker’s series conveys a distinct sense oftime and place: from the undisguised luxury and classd ynamics of beauty parlors in her series Painted Ladies, to the humanistic portraits of refugees and asylum seekers in Home (commissioned by Kettle’s Yard, UK), to scenes of anonymous women at work framed by the architecture of London in service. In her recent artworks, Walker turns her focus to her immediate surroundings. She explores the boundary between being an observer – that is preserving the “objective” eye of an outsider – and magnifying the experience of a place which has become part of the fabric ofher life. They are conceived as a reflection on community and how the anonymous people we encounter become characters in our own stories. Her subjects include a neighbor working in her garden, the local drycleaner and a pharmacy sales assistant, all of whom are connected within a discrete area of the sprawling London metropolis. Walker describes small movements of daily existence and encapsulates the corners of life which are often overlooked but nonetheless vital, written and erased from history over and over again. They also serve as a kind of self-portrait by recording the artist’s journey through the places she frequents. Walker has received wide acclaim for her portrayals of women as works of social commentary, although itis her ability to distill viewpoints from familiar settings and her talent as a colorist that first impact viewers of her paintings. The complexities of her subjects’ lives filter through to the surface and coalesce in imagesthat both fulfill the senses and speak to poignant moments of human experience. As a cohesive body of work, Walker’s paintings explore the performance of gender identity, femininity, and question the norms of depicting women and the female form across a range of socio-economic contexts.
