Image: David Zwirner, New York
The exhibition focuses on the Antiguan artist, writer, and polymath, who lived from 1926 to 2009. It will be Walter’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and the first dedicated presentation of his work on the West Coast.
The Los Angeles presentation will include a representative selection of paintings spanning Walter’s recurrent subject matter, including vividly colored landscapes, vignettes, and portraits. It will also feature a focused installation of intimate, tondo-format paintings from the artist’s Spool series.
Made late in Walter’s life, the Spool paintings were partly influenced by memories of a transatlantic journey he endured aboard a ship. The works express his fascination with capturing and conjuring a distinctive vision of nature, while their porthole-like forms serve as portals and embody themes of both the broader exhibition and his wider oeuvre.
Informed by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the five ‘scapes’ of globalization, the presentation considers how Walter’s compositions touch on the dreamscape, landscape, and ethnoscape. This framework brings together racial, genealogical, geographical, historical, and imaginary dimensions in an understanding of the artist’s visual world. The exhibition is one of several international projects celebrating the centenary of Walter’s birth.
