Kelley Walker

The Paula Cooper Gallery presents a series of twelve recent brick paintings by Kelley Walker.

Created between 2013–14, Walker’s large canvases of powdery silkscreened bricks are lined and separated with fragments of pages from Domus.

The artist began making his brick paintings in 2005, first entirely in silkscreen and later adding collaged printed material. Walker begins by scanning individual bricks, which he then arranges into a stacked alignment and silkscreens using a four-color process. According to the artist, “I print the silkscreens on canvas with uneven, uncalibrated hand pressure. This results in a mostly off-color photographic image, with infinite unseen variations” (Kelley Walker, Kelley Walker, exhibition catalogue, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, 2008, p. 75).

The resulting panels oscillate between illusionism and flatness, as each 10-foot canvas appears to be at once a brick wall and a variation of an abstract grid. Between the gaps, glossy pages stand in as the “mortar” and seem to emerge from behind the bricks, when in fact they are pasted on top of the canvas surface. Walker’s cycle of twelve works corresponds to the publication’s twelve monthly issues, as each painting draws from one issue of Domus magazine. The exhibition, then, creates a methodical timeline that spans the entire year of 2012, where each painting acts as an indexical temporal marker and a self-referential brick wall. Walker observed, “I think of the canvas as having a mimetic relationship not only to the wall the work might be displayed on, but also to the structure of the bricks and cinder blocks in the urban cityscape of New York. Outside my studio window, I see various ways these building materials are used – structurally as well as decoratively, stacked both horizontally and vertically” (Kelley Walker, ibid, p. 76).

until April 18, 2015
Kelley Walker
Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street, New York