Casey Kaplan
Artsy | Ella Walker’s Dynamic Paintings Offer a Feminist Update on Medieval Frescoes
Jul 12, 2022
Ella Walker cleverly combines medieval allegories with the woes of contemporary womanhood in her flamboyant, large-scale, fresco-like paintings. The Manchester-born and London-based artist creates shallow, flatly pigmented backgrounds and highly texturized foregrounds. With chalk, pencil, ink, and tempera, she depicts female figures with medieval flourishes. Her work is dynamic, theatrical, and pointed.
Queen of the Night (2022), for example, features a chorus of three crouching women who gaze upon a faceless puppet with a hole at her heart. The fine linework and the women’s faces, seen in profile, evoke the styles of medieval frescoes. Throughout her compositions, Walker mingles period dress with contemporary shoes, undergarments, harnesses, and jewelry. She uses unstretched canvas and hangs her paintings against wooden armatures, a choice that evokes stage backdrops. The artist makes herself a central character in her dramas, painting her likeness into complex tragicomedies.
Ayanna Dozier
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