Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Private collection, Europe
Catalogue Essay
“I don’t escape the effects of branding but think of the processes associated with appropriation as a way of dealing with branding as a social space.” KELLEY WALKER
New York based artist Kelley Walker has long situated his incomparable practice in dialogue with modern design and social media. Walker’s investigation, subsequent skewering, and finally his elevation of the modern photographic or design-based image has carved out a space for him in the pantheon of young contemporary artists. His satirically bent and socially conscious works have gained him status as one of our shrewdest visual innovators, as evidenced in the present lot, Untitled, 2006. Employing one of his most trusted mediums– the Inkjet printer– Walker creates a design pastiche, a prototype that demonstrates the personal nature and technological means of distributing modern art.
Much like his frequent collaborator, Wade Guyton, Walker places an essential emphasis on the nature of the popular image, and, more specically, the recognizable motif. Untitled, 2006, comes to us as a mesmerizing portrait of Walker’s means of production itself. The alternating red and black bars create areas of indefinite coloring between them in an optical bonanza of illusion. Highlights of blue and yellow round out the ink on the canvas, simultaneously evoking Warhol’s iconic silkscreens and the famed Color Field paintings of Joseph Albers. Walker’s genius, however, lies in the intentional granularity of the printer’s color saturation; each individual pigment stamp is visible. While Lichtenstein chose to paint the Ben-Day dot to “industrialize” his work, Kelly Walker allows the Ben-day dot to speak for itself, as real as the design that it creates.