Ella Walker

Ella Walker (b. 1993, Manchester, United Kingdom) is a British artist who is based in London.

Using both traditional and contemporary painting techniques and materials, the artist works from a myriad of source imagery – iconography, medieval manuscripts, and classical sculpture to modern ballet, fashion and the cinema of Fellini and Pasolini – unifying historic and contemporary figures and narratives within a single picture plane.

Walker applies light washes of acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk and marble dust, with selective intensity to an absorbent and textured ground. Employing the spatial logics of fresco and its shallow depth of field, Walker builds her tableaux, placing her painted subjects within stage-like scenes that defy easy delineation between ecstasy, eroticism and suffering.

With a background in drawing from Old Masters and the figure, her paintings contain refined line work and luminosity that recall Piero della Francesca, while the architectural planes and figures’ costume design call upon Giorgio de Chirico. Through these techniques, Walker creates ambiguous narratives that prompt us to consider the intertwined complexities of pleasure and pain. Placing the figure centre-stage, Walker constructs depictions of predominantly female bodies and interrogates traditional depictions of women in a history of painting.

 Ella Walker received her BA in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, before joining The Royal Drawing School, London, where she earned a Postgraduate Diploma in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Romance of the Rose, Pilar Corrias, London (2024); After great pain, a formal feeling comes, Casey Kaplan, New York (2024); Chorus, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2023) and Distant Conversations: Ella Walker and Betty Woodman, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire (2023). Selected group exhibitions include: Present Tense, Hauser and Wirth Somerset, UK (2024); Where the threads are worn, Casey Kaplan, New York (2021); Fertile Laziness, Platform Southwark, London, UK (2021) and Bathing nervous limbs, Edinburgh Art Festival, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2021).