John Walker, Knoedler & Company, NYC - Collage

John Walker: Collage
Knoedler & Company, New York
February 3 – March 19, 2005

Knoedler & Company presents a survey focused on John Walker's work in collage, spanning the years 1974-78, and returning to his most recent explorations dating 2003-04.

John Walker created his earliest collages, including the Juggernauts, when he was in his mid-thirties, in residence in the United States and teaching at The Cooper Union (1974-75), the New York Studio School (1974-75), Columbia University (1975), and Yale University Graduate School of Art and Architecture (1975-77). In these early collages John Walker departed from Cubist convention by working in massive scale (10 x 8 feet) vertical formats. With large pieces of canvas and collage material, these works are characterized by powerful jutting, layered, and angular forms, as in Juggernaut with Plume for P. Neruda, which was awarded First Prize at John Moores Liverpool Exhibition–10 in 1976. The Ostraca and Numinous series followed in 1977-78 — the Numinous collages linking Walker to a tradition of painters that includes Manet, Goya, and Matisse (whose cut-paper collages also inspired Walker).

The first American museum exhibition of Walker's collages was held at The Phillips Collection in 1978. Ostraca I and Numinous II, in the current Knoedler show, were included in The Phillips exhibition (as were Numinous I, now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, and Ostraca II, in The Phillips Collection).

Since 2000, a central motif in John Walker's work has been the muddy inlets and tidepools near his Maine home. He observes this subject intimately through its many permutations — during high and low tides, through all weathers and seasons, at all times of day and night. His most recent collages fall within this series — freely painted, they are composed of heavy torn paper layered upon paper, overwritten with text inspired by local Maine roadside signs. As Dore Ashton describes, "In these new collages, Walker literally paints with mud, as though he cannot get close enough to this elemental matter, much as Picasso at the end of his life portrayed the artist – himself – literally painting on the model."

John Walker: Collage is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essay by Dore Ashton. 

KNOEDLER & COMPANY
19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021
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