Ella Walker cleverly combines medieval allegories with the hardships of contemporary femininity in her splendid, large -scale, fresco -like paintings. The London-born and Manchester-based artist creates shallow, flatly pigmented backgrounds and very texturized foregrounds. Using chalk, pencil, ink, and tempera, she depicts female figures with medieval flourishes. His work is dynamic, theatrical, and sharp.
queen of the night (2022), for example, features a chorus of three stooped women looking at a faceless puppet with a hole in its heart. The fine linework and the women’s faces, seen in the profile, inspire medieval fresco styles. Throughout her compositions, Walker mixes period dress with contemporary shoes, undergarment, harness, and jewelry. He uses unstretched canvas and hangs his paintings on wooden armatures, an option that projects backdrops on stage. The actor makes himself a major character in his dramas, painting his resemblance to complex tragicomedies.
Walker’s new show, “Theater of Virtues and Vices” by Casey Kaplan, establishes the artist as an ascendant artist and firmly delivers his stellar, sold-out solo booth along with the gallery at Frieze London in 2021. The new exhibition, featuring eight dazzling, fresco-like paintings and two smaller works, offers a stateside introduction to Walker’s training — his first outing, presented by London’s Huxley-Parlor, was closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Walker, who completed his BFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2015 and a postgraduate degree at the Royal Drawing School in 2018, is represented by Casey Kaplan.
In all 10 pieces, Walker reconsiders the vices and virtues (hope/despair, charity/envy, faith/divinity, restraint/anger, and modesty/ignorance) that adorn Giotto. Chapel of Scrovegni (1305) in Padua, Italy. The famous fresco series depicts the life of Christ, from the proclamation to the Virgin Mother to the ascension of Christ from the tomb to heaven following his crucifixion.
Walker twists his own characters, often combining them with other figures and costumes or displaying them in captivating positions. Sa troops (2022), for example, a female figure appears as a cortored, sworn woman — she wears red lingerie, exposing cuts on her body, and her face is covered. The characters in the background wear bodices that become inseparable from their flesh or extensions of their bodies; these features inspire the bizarre style popularized during the medieval period.
Sa Stupidity (2022), three female figures stand upright, with a suffering woman in the middle. The composition gives rise to the idea of the pharmakon, or a scapegoat whose exile, suffering, and death provide an opportunity for the rest of his community to unite. The “Theater of Virtues and Vices” is full of brutal parables. Walker engages with historical styles and art forms, putting her own voice and perspective to come up with new depictions of women and the limited roles society has offered them, from the medieval age to the present.
