Ella Walker

Forming part of Le Château’s summer season dedicated to dreams, Idolâtrie marks Ella Walker’s first solo exhibition in a French institution.

Idolâtrie brings together a body of recent paintings, several of which were created specifically for the occasion. Titled after a work displayed at the centre of the exhibition, this presentation places the female figure at the heart of a richly layered pictorial theatre, where the codes of representation are replayed – if not overturned. Formally, Walker’s paintings are striking in their materiality. By mixing marble powder with acrylic pigments, Walker creates matte, almost porous surfaces that absorb light like aged frescoes – textures dense with memory. This mineral quality evokes carved stone, wounded or sanctified flesh and blurs any clear sense of time, as if the figures were emerging from a fragmented collective memory. This density is met with a visual tension: sharp lines and soft erasures, sculpted flesh and zones of abstraction. Everything overlaps, floats, resists.