For her third solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan, Ella Walker (b. 1993, Manchester, UK) presents The Street, a new body of work roused from a lucid dream of remembered places and human intrigue set halfway between the Renaissance and present day. Across six large scale paintings, a cast of characters move through brick-lined streets with uncanny spatial logic, fragmenting their bodies into a palimpsest of limbs, faces, and disembodied hands. Layered and diluted paint flows in translucent swathes of color dammed by assertive outlines, occasionally revealing the ghostly pentimenti of an altered pose or worked-over figure. Introducing contemporary costumes and observed environments, Walker’s expanded visual language grounds and reinvents the drama of an interior self set loose in the outside world.
Reading like a frieze around the perimeter of the gallery, the horizontal and vertical tableaus rally across pictorial space, shuttling the viewer between public settings and private rooms. A journey from left to right in The Studio II (2026) juxtaposes a group of buildings recalled from the urban architecture around her London studio with the inside of the studio itself, revealing the creamy verso of a stretched canvas and the exposed back of a kneeling figure.
The viewer’s voyeuristic gaze continues unconfronted through the gallery – Walker’s upright and nearly life size characters are aligned at eye level. A sole horizontal figure sits in bed in Theorem, (2026), her thinly painted skin a raw counterpoint to the circle of onlookers and meticulously rendered brick colonnade at left. Walker intersects these private moments of awakening with the directive to unmask and perform – a central theme in her practice – in the covertly theatrical space of the street.
This cinematic collage of places and people create a reality adjacent to the every day – a palpable kind of surrealism mixed with a colloquial style. Energetic brushstrokes zigzag across pavements and bodies alike, the acrylic dispersion drying down to a chalky, powder-like quality evocative of fresco. Painted atop (and sometimes underneath) these color fields, figures pause in angular postures that telegraph sudden and subtle moments of action. An androgynous character puffs cigarette smoke into a statuesque figure’s eyes while an overlapping lineup of faces look on in Relic (2026). Another painting, Action (2026), depicts a topless woman in black slacks holding a stone while a disembodied arm clutches a blunt stick; inches away, a young child in a malachite green dress innocently fiddles with the hand of a disengaged adult.
Charged with ambivalent independence, Walker’s new troupe shrugs off traditional typecasts in favor of unrehearsed, destabilized encounters. Delicate linework incises their mask-like expressions, both exaggerated yet unperturbed by ruptures in public decency or bodily integrity. The beguiling scenes evoke the eerie stasis of The Street, a 1933 painting by Balthus. Here, city dwellers freeze mid-stride in a horizonless, starkly detailed downtown; akin to Walker’s figures, they see through one another, gazes locked within outlined bodies posed at right angles that end in expressive, intentional hand postures.
Though foreshortened checkerboard floors and snippets of linear perspective allude to the space outside the picture plane, the denizens of Walker’s streets hold back from inviting the viewer into their spectacle. Disinterested in our performance as the audience, they take the role of observer unto themselves; as actors released into every day life, their theatrics bely the startling naturalism laid bare in Walker’s paintings.
