HANNOVER.- Kestner Gesellschaft is presenting the first institutional solo exhibition of British artist Ella Walker (b. 1993, Manchester, UK).

Within the intersection of medieval and contemporary spaces, Ella Walker moves freely, interchanging histories with invented scenes that are both referential and dream-like. By creating imagery that merges art historical iconography from the Trecento and Renaissance periods, theatrical sets and stock characters from Commedia dell'Arte, contemporary ballet, and costume design inspired by 1960s cinematic scenes and fashion magazines, Walker translates ritual into innovation, refitting old narratives into contemporary plots of unfolding tragedy, comedy, and love.

The resulting meeting challenges viewers’ understanding of the sacred and profane, while simultaneously encouraging the rethinking of binaries of old and new, high and low culture. Walker combines painting and drawing (using a vast array of mediums including tempera, gesso, pastel, and ink) to create shallow, stage-like depths of field and interspersing planes of color that usurp holistic understandings of structure and composition.

In her first institutional solo exhibition, Ella Walker combines a variety of historical and cultural motifs and figures in painterly and thematically complex works that become stages for human interaction across time. She creates shallow, flat pigmented backgrounds and heavily textured foregrounds in which she adroitly blends allegories. Her works are dynamic, theatrical, and pointed, and weave historical images and themes with contemporary ones. Using chalk, pencil, ink, and tempera, she depicts female figures, which, unlike in mediaeval iconography (where they often appear as sacred and worshipped), she distorts those depictions by placing them in various dialogues with other figures, fusing them with garments or showing them in contemptuous positions. Present in almost all of her works is a strong sense of intimacy. However, gestures of tenderness and communion appear next to aggressive and violent gestures. Pain and beauty are close in many arts, such as the art of ballet, as well as in religious paintings.

Although Walker's paintings recontextualize well-known figures from art and film history, it is not necessary to recognize the specific characters. Thus, the figures are rather to be understood as anonymous performers that inhabit Walker's painterly stages. Their gestures, actions, and elements from art history combined with the different painting styles, some reminiscent of ancient frescoes, give the works a "feeling of past."

Chorus, the title of the exhibition and the large central work, comes from the theatre of ancient Greece. Chorus refers to a group of singers, dancers or performers, usually characterizing the common people and their voice (vox populi). In a sense, the chorus also functioned as an abstraction of society making it the "ideal spectator" according to Schlegel. Her works in the exhibition, including the large and central work Chorus of the eponymous exhibition, all show a kind of stage populated by various group constellations in which the boundaries between leads and extras dissolve. On the stages the characters, in their historical and cultural references, become actors in timeless explorations of closeness, tenderness, love, community, exclusion, violence, and pain.

Ella Walker was born in Manchester in 1993 and earned her bachelor's degree in painting and printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art in 2015. In 2018, she completed the Drawing Year Postgraduate Program at the Royal Drawing School in London. She lives and works in London.

Kestner Gesellschaft
Ella Walker: Chorus
July 8th, 2023 - October 1st, 2023
There will be an artist talk at Kestner Gesellschaft on Thursday, July 27, 6:30 - 8PM.