New York artist John Walker's latest paintings assault the viewer with breath-taking impact on visceral, intellectual, and poetic planes. The paintings engage history, biography, and poetry in a complex dialogue with World War I. Walker wrestles with the war's horror, its enormous and bloody casualties, and its continuing public memory, in a series of 15 works that directly address specific battles. This is also a person history for Walker: he lost 11 uncles in one day in 1916, and he remembers accounts of his father's ...
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New York artist John Walker's latest paintings assault the viewer with breath-taking impact on visceral, intellectual, and poetic planes. The paintings engage history, biography, and poetry in a complex dialogue with World War I. Walker wrestles with the war's horror, its enormous and bloody casualties, and its continuing public memory, in a series of 15 works that directly address specific battles. This is also a person history for Walker: he lost 11 uncles in one day in 1916, and he remembers accounts of his father's experiences in the infantry. The paintings simultaneously engage in a more universal dialogue, with the inclusion of lines from two of Great Britain's most haunting poets of World War I, Wilfred Owen and David Jones. There lines are obsessively painted across the canvasses, burning into memory in paint as well as words.
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