Pilar Corrias is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by artist Ella Walker at its Savile Row gallery.
For her first exhibition with the gallery, Walker intricately weaves imagery from broad swathes of history and popular culture – medieval manuscripts to modern ballet, the cinema of Fellini and Pasolini to fetishwear magazines – to produce emotive, stage-like scenes. Interrogating traditional depictions of women throughout art history, Walker’s paintings offer a counterpoint to the traditional casting of female subjects as exemplars of vice and virtue. Freed from this moral framework, her figures are recalibrated, reentering the world of images as complex, contradictory, unruly beings.
The exhibition takes as its point of departure the thirteenthcentury French poem, The Romance of the Rose, in which a lover hunts for an object to love. The allegorical tale of courtly love is replete with patriarchal language – the repeated references to ‘plucking’ the perfect ‘rosebud’ underscore the imperativeness of feminine chastity and the process of deflowering as a chivalrous project. As he attempts to navigate love’s true course, the narrator encounters a series of generic female characters representing various vices, including Idleness, Avarice, Hatred and Envy, all of whom serve as cautionary obstacles. In Walker’s compositions, however, this chorus of archetypes are relieved of their duties. Each figure becomes self-sufficient, with their own interior life.