Untitled, 2007. Four-colour silkscreen on canvas with Hola! magazine. 121.9 × 73.7 cm (47 7/8 × 29 in). Signed and dated ‘K Walker 2007’ on the reverse.

PROVENANCE Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Kelley Walker is one of the most celebrated contemporary artists of the past decade. His artworks, such as the brick works, often examine ideas of recycling and re-appropriation, in a development from Andy Warhol’s critique of our consumer culture for a 21st-century audience. In Untitled, 2007, Walker uses Adobe Photoshop to subvert the naturalistic bricks by saturating the CYMK colours, enlarging and stacking the images vertically: transforming an everyday staple into fodder for high art. Closer inspection reveals magazine pages cementing the cracks, their alluring headlines and images obscured and illegible. Walker highlights popular culture’s infiltration into the very foundations of our consumer society, and this fabricated artifice is exposed as a precarious replacement for our past security. Untitled, 2007, is a powerful example of Walker’s incisive critique of contemporary culture which subverts our superficial stability in today’s unpredictable world. “Walker becomes involved with a series of subtle changes to the same images over time; he finds ways to stage and restage them so that past histories inform their present state and their present condition in turn inflects their former meanings and future incarnations. In this way Walker dramatises how art can function more in terms of an ongoing continuum and less as specific objects made in anticipation of predictable responses.” (R. Hobbs, ‘Kelly Walker’s Continuum: Consuming and Recycling as Aesthetic Tactics’, in Seth Price/Kelly Walker: Continuous Project, Oxford, : Modern Art Oxford, 2007)