Artist: Ella Walker

Pilar Corrias presents 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.

Characters who have been overlooked or undermined traditionally now take centre stage: the stock commedia dell’arte character of the servetta, the jealous crone, the madwoman, the glee-maiden and sorceress; in short, uncontainable, insolent women whose example we are not meant to follow. Cheeky, mask-like faces jeer out from the canvas; a fist pummels the floor in a state of protest. In The Bridled Sweeties (2024), a Maria Callas lookalike rolls her eyes back into her head, in what could be an expression of delirium, orgasm, or simply boredom.

Walker’s transhistorical approach is mirrored in her use of materials and techniques, where light washes of acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk and marble dust commingle upon a textured ground. Employing the spatial logics of fresco and its shallow depth of field, the refined line work and luminosity of the artist’s paintings recall Piero della Francesca, while the architectural planes and costume design evoke Giorgio de Chirico. Unifying historic and contemporary narratives and materials within a single picture plane, Walker reinjects a joyful spirit of punk feminism back into the past, a freedom that allows the messy woman all the levity, comedy and complexity she merits.