Scottish Artist Caroline Walker’s Ascent at Auction Adheres to a Familiar Formula
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Loading... - Luis Borja
- 16 Mar 2023
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In London earlier this month, a painting by the Scottish artist Caroline Walker titled Threshold sold at Phillips for $1.1 million, a new record for the artist and over six times its estimate. The sale came just days after another work of hers, The Puppeteer (2014), set a record at Christie’s, selling for over $800,000.
The paintings are typical of Walker’s practice, depicting figures performing household tasks or lounging in backyards, often seen from afar, as though from the view of a stranger looking through a window. While images of women at work are age-old in the art historical canon, Walker has made a name for herself in the U.K. art gallery scene. Her work has risen in the market alongside that ascent. Artsy, an online aggregator of art sale data, recently cited Walker as a commercial force and, in 2022, 32 works by her sold at auction.
In London, Walker provided a case study for current market forces. At 41, Walker does not fit as either an emerging figure or as a late career canonical artist, two categories that account for a bulk of auction sales. Instead, attention around her work has appeared along a different, but still familiar archetype. Her work is tinted with feminist leanings and contains references to canonical male artists, features that adhere to a commercial formula predicated on the tastes of a small minority of collectors.
Critics have compared Walker’s paintings to male-dominated areas of the canon, like the Dutch old masters, and to artists David Hockney and Eric Fischl, figures well-known to U.K. and West Coast audiences. The latter two she cites as references, whose works “originate from the male perspective,” Jorg Grimm, an Amsterdam-based dealer who represents Walker, told ARTnews. Read More..
