Kelley Walker (born 1969 Columbus, Georgia) is an American post-conceptual artist who lives and works in New York City. He uses advertising and digital media to make "paintings" using screen printing and/or digital printing technologies.http://www.artnet.com/artists/kelley-walker/ Kelley Walker: digital media artist, sculptor and installation artist His art appropriation art, appropriates iconic cultural images, altering them to highlight underlying issues of American politics and consumerism. He produces work collaboratively with artist Wade Guyton under the name ''Guyton\Walker''.

Education

Walker graduated with a BFA from the University of Tennessee in 1995, and graduated from The University of Arizona with an MFA in 1998.

Art work

Walker often presents large-scale billboard-like canvases set at 90 degree angles, sometimes splattered with abstracted patterns in symbolic white color and chocolate, such as in his ''Black Star Press'' from 2006, a digital painting triptych on canvas.http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/kelley_walker.htm Kelley Walker at SAATCHI GALLERY Walker’s gestures mimic violence, merging ethical corruption with graffiti and pop art. He also makes sculpture and installation art. Since 2005, Walker has been working with bricks, first entirely in silkscreen and later adding collaged printed material.Stephanie Murg (March 9, 2015)
Kelley Walker tears down convention brick by brick
''Wallpaper (magazine), Wallpaper''. Created between 2013–14, his identically sized, 2.5-meter tall canvases of powdery silkscreened bricks are lined and separated with fragments of pages from the Italian architecture and design magazine ''Domus (magazine), Domus''.Kelley Walker, March 3 - April 18, 2015
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. In each one of the paintings, Walker begins by scanning individual bricks, which he then arranges into a stacked alignment and silkscreens using a four-color process.

Exhibitions

Walker has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Wiels, WIELS in Brussels, Belgium; Le Magasin in Grenoble, France; Modern Art Oxford in Oxford, United Kingdom; and Museum De Hallen, Haarlem in The Netherlands. His work was included in the 2005 ''Greater New York'' exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and ''USA Today'' at the Royal Academy in London. He participated in the 7th Sharjah Biennial, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and the 2007 Lyon Biennale.

Collections

Walker's work has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Sammlung Goetz in Munich.

Gallery representation

Walker is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan; and Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels.

Controversy

On September 17, 2016 Kelley Walker became the center of major controversy after giving an opening artist talk for his show, Direct Drive, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Controversy arose after Walker avoided audience questions regarding his intent in using racial imagery and symbolism. As a consequence there has been much backlash against Walker, CAM STL and head curator Jeffrey Uslip.

Footnotes

External links

Kelley Walker, WIELS, Brussels, Belgium, 9/6–11/2/2008Seth Price/Kelley Walker/Continuous Project, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK, 4/28–7/1/2007Kelley Walker, Paula Cooper Gallery
{{DEFAULTSORT:Walker, Kelley American digital artists 1969 births Living people People from Columbus, Georgia University of Tennessee alumni 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters Postmodern artists Artists from New York (state) New media artists 20th-century American printmakers Post-conceptual artists American contemporary painters 20th-century American male artists