Casey Kaplan is pleased to present The Strife of Love in a Dream, a solo presentation of recent paintings and works on paper by Ella Walker (b. 1993, Manchester, UK) for the 2021 edition of Frieze London.
Captivated by Italian illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance paintings, along with medieval narratives and symbolism, Ella Walker transforms art historical iconography to invented, theatrical scenes of love, tragedy, and mystery. Her unstretched, large format canvases combine techniques of painting, drawing, and fresco—incorporating a vast array of mediums including, tempura, gesso, pastel, and ink. Shallow, “stage-like” depths of field are interspersed with flat planes of color that disturb her viewer’s holistic sense of structure and composition. Transforming traditional scenes and spaces into tableaux suffused with drama, romance, mischief, and playfulness, Walker’s work inhabits the enigmatic architecture of a daydream. For the artist, the ritual of painting and the act of dreaming are inextricably bound—merging to create, in Walker’s own words, a “magic realism.”
The settings for Walker’s fantastical compositions often take inspiration from a variety of classical ballets, books and operas, which she reinterprets; incorporating invented actors within these medieval narratives, which historically excluded complex female characters. In her newest body of work, Walker directly references Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream), originally published in Venice 1499. The classical tale chronicles the dreams of the protagonist, Poliphilo, who suffers from insomnia. When Poliphilo finally falls asleep, he encounters vast architecture, monsters, and ancient monuments on his quest to win the affection of his love, Polia. The text is accompanied by a series of 172 woodcut illustrations, interwoven within the text, depicting erotic, allegorical, and mythological scenes from his dreams, which Walker reproduces in linear graphite drawings on the paintings’ versos.
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Ella Walker, Sacred Conversation Painting, 2021 (with verso)
Her images—lighthearted yet unsettling—decisively position Walker’s contemporary perspective within a medieval world through the inclusion of current fashion, and a vibrant color palette. In works like Sacred Conversation Painting (2021), the artist reimagines classical figures and costume, infusing this invented world of the past with satire and contemporary aesthetics. The title of the work is inspired by sacra conversazione, a genre of painting developed in the Italian Renaissance—an era the artist often draws from for its use of color and composition. On the verso of Sacred Conversation Painting, Walker transcribes an excerpt from The Strife of Love in a Dream describing the garments worn by the characters amidst a tense passage of the story, which reads,
The hems surrounding their garment
were decorated with unimaginable knotwork fringes,
which were sometimes blown by the gentle breezes
to give a glimpse of their rounded, ivory legs.
Walker uses both text and image from the source material to inform our understanding of the larger composition. An angel, dressed wearing a chest-plate that more closely resembles a strapless bustier than protective armor, is accompanied by two other seraphs similarly robed in ostensibly present-day luxury designs. Two tearful figures, kneeling in a tender embrace, are rendered in malachite—a natural pigment derived from rocks and minerals that was commonly used in ancient paintings. Through the thoughtful inclusion of this rare pigment, Walker links the actual materiality of her canvas to the themes of nature and cultivated landscape extensively discussed in The Strife of Love in a Dream, although ultimately confining this natural substance to an entirely artificial reality within the composition.
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Ella Walker, Red Painting, 2021 (with verso)
Walker produces dreamscapes that are often physically and spatially impossible. The resulting paintings contain a multitude of exceptionally thin layers of paint, and washes of pure pigment that are applied gradually to yield ethereal veils of color over underpainted outlines. Through her close engagement with allegory in Poliphilo’s journey in The Strife of Love in a Dream, Walker became transfixed by the potential physical, transformative space of dreaming. Red Painting (2021) highlights this fascination with these spaces of the unconscious, as the composition can only exist within an imagined landscape. The referenced text and illustration on the verso of Red Painting, relates to the tearing of flesh as bodies move through this fantasy realm,
Wandering they knew not where, hoping for escape, they were forced through devious and pathless places and dense thorn - bushes, lacerated by the deadly whip and the heat of the burning chariot, often turning aside only to be scratched by the bushes, torn from head to foot.
Seemingly describing the events of a nightmare, rather than those of a dream, the selected excerpt highlights the violence inflicted on the central character of Red Painting who kneels with her hands clasped, adorned in small gashes that cover her exposed chest and shoulders, while vivid iron-oxide red pigment used to render drops of blood recall the embellished, dramatized quality of stage makeup. These fictional visions, planted within Walker’s theatrically inclined environments, compel her viewers to imagine a world separate from reality. As the artist states, “I’m drawn to the transformation, the ritual, the ceremony, the party. So, when I’m making a painting, I am thinking about an event, and how I can make a version of an exciting experience.”
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Ella Walker
Justine 2, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
82.68 x 39.37 x 7.87” / 210 x 100 x 20cm
EW2021-003
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Ella Walker, Justine 2, 2021 (detail)
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Ella Walker
Sacred Conversation Painting, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
82.68 x 55.12 x 7.87” / 210 x 140 x 20cm
EW2021-016
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Ella Walker, Sacred Conversation Painting, 2021 (detail)
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Ella Walker
Red Painting, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
82.68 x 55.12 x 7.87” / 210 x 140 x 20cm
EW2021-015
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Ella Walker, Red Painting, 2021 (detail)
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Ella Walker
Angels Painting, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
82.68 x 39.37 x 7.87” / 210 x 100 x 20cm
EW2021-008
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Ella Walker, Angels Painting, 2021 (detail)
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Ella Walker
The Wife of Bath, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
82.68 x 39.37 x 7.87” / 210 x 100 x 20cm
EW2021-005
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Ella Walker, The Wife of Bath, 2021 (detail)
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Ella Walker
The Spirit of the Rose, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
82.68 x 39.37 x 7.87” / 210 x 100 x 20cm
EW2021-009
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Ella Walker, The Spirit of the Rose, 2021 (detail)
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Ella Walker
Heroines, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
82.68 x 39.37 x 7.87" / 210 x 100 x 20cm
EW2021-004
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Ella Walker, Heroines, 2021 (detail)
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Ella Walker
Juliette, 2021
Acrylic and ink on paper, stretched
11.81 x 8.27 x 1.26” / 30 x 21 x 3.2cm
EW2021-013
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Ella Walker, Juliette, 2021 (alternate view)
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Ella Walker
Justine, 2021
Acrylic and ink on paper, stretched
11.81 x 8.27 x 1.26” / 30 x 21 x 3.2cm
EW2021-012
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Ella Walker, Justine, 2021 (alternate view)
