"The subject of my paintings in its broadest sense is women’s experience […] From the anonymous to the highly personal, what links all these subjects is an investigation of an experience which is specifically female."
—Caroline Walker Highly cinematic in its sense of scale, narrative urgency, and bold contrasts of light and shadow, Night Scenes is a particularly seductive and compelling work by Scottish artist Caroline Walker. The title painting from her 2017 exhibition with ProjectB in Milan, Night Scenes lays bare some of the central tensions between public and private, empathy and voyeurism that animate her most powerful paintings. Recalling the juxtapositions of night and day used to such captivating effect in René Magritte’s iconic L’Empire des lumières series, Walker’s arresting work crystallises the contradictions of night time darkness as at once concealing and revealing. While Magritte’s amplification of these tensions served his philosophical interrogation into the nature of perception and reality, Walker instead turns this lens inward in her psychologically-driven paintings of feminine interiority.
 

Dramatically framed by the rigid geometry of an impressive modernist home set on a hillside above Los Angeles and brightly illuminated against the softly diffused evening light, a lone woman leans against a wall of the home’s secluded courtyard. Her hair wrapped in a towel, one hand unconsciously clutches the opening of her dressing gown while a lit cigarette hangs lightly in the other. Her gaze leads us to the open gateway in the foreground, a compositional device that not only opens a voyeuristic window into this moment of unguarded privacy, but allows us a tantalising glimpse into the interior life of this woman. Carefully balancing observation with empathy, the narrative ambiguity is especially loaded here: as the woman gazes out towards the open door is she following a departing figure, or awaiting someone’s arrival? Is she freshly washed in preparation for bed, or is the night only just beginning?

 

California Dreaming

 

As Walker has explained, her paintings operate as ‘formalised fictions concerned with the strange or ambiguous which can arise in the everyday and the banal’, a feature that is especially poignant in her Californian pictures from this period where lone, anonymous women set within glamourous settings seem to foreground ‘the notion of disappointed expectations and a kind of faded grandeur of what could have been.’ⁱ In their depiction of impossibly manicured gardens, light-filled modernist buildings, and sun-soaked pools, David Hockney’s highly celebrated California Dreaming series similarly highlighted the complex relationships at work between people and the spaces they occupy.

 

Although often distilling a fantasy of mid-century West Coast good life, paintings such as his 1966 Beverly Hills Housewife move closer to Walker’s subtle probing of the contradictions between luxury and the banality of its everyday reality. Standing, statuesque, on the terrace of her rigidly symmetrical span house, Hockney presents art collector and patron Betty Freeman like another object among her collection; still, impassive, and isolated from the world beyond the home. Playing with the same deeply entrenched cultural connections between women and domestic space, Walker’s framing of this anonymous woman within the illuminated courtyard here poignantly emphasises a kind of lonely detachment, and yet in this granular focus, Walker gives this sensation a universal resonance, connecting the richness of her inner life to the sea of anonymous lights rolling out into the background.

 

The Politics of Looking

 

Treading the line between intrusion and intimacy, Walker’s exquisitely handled paintings seem to capture fleeting moments of unguarded honesty, and yet her compositions from this period tend to be meticulously planned and carefully choreographed performances. As Benno Tempel describes, ‘each composition is carefully prepared. A setting – location, character and action – is found and photographed. Her photos are the starting point for sketches. These lead to studies in oil, where she explores colours and brushwork.’ⁱⁱ

 

Combining the quiet introspection of Vilhelm Hammershøi and the more overt voyeurism of American artists Edward Hopper and Eric Fischl, Walker here places us in the position of unseen observer, her awkwardly elevated perspective and cropped angles charged with the fleeting sensation of the snapshot, despite their careful planning. As the artist explains, her paintings will often include ‘something you have to look through or past to get to the subject of the work’, architectural obstacles that frame her compositions, but also introduce a vital sense of distance between us and the private world we are intruding upon. For Walker, ‘looking is linked to technique’, the open gate in Night Scenes underscoring the boundary lines between inside and outside, private and public, light and dark that her luscious, painterly compositions dramatise.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Since graduating from her MA with the Royal College of Art in 2009, Walker has been the subject of several solo exhibitions internationally, including Janey at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh in 2020, Women’s Work at the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham in 2021, and the forthcoming exhibition at K11 in Shanghai in November 2022.

 

• Following her exhibition Caroline Walker: Birth Reflections held at Fitzrovia Chapel, London in the early months of 2022, Walker’s latest solo show, Lisa, at Stephen Freidman Gallery presented a deeply intimate series of portraits documenting her sister-in-law’s journey through the first months of motherhood.

 

• Walker’s works are included in a number of prominent public collections, including the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, The UK Government Art Collection, London, and Kunstmuseum in The Hague.

 

ⁱ Caroline Walker, quoted in ‘Artists Statement’, Liverpool Museums, 2006.
ⁱⁱ Benno Tempel, ‘A Day in a Life’, in Caroline Walker, Windows (exh. cat.), Amsterdam, 2021, p. 5.
ⁱⁱⁱ Benno Tempel, ‘A Day in a Life’, in Caroline Walker, Windows (exh. cat.), Amsterdam, 2021, p. 5.