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Utopia Art Sydney present John R Walker
Sydney Contemporary 2023, Booth C01
Carriageworks
7 to 11 September
Wynne Prize finalist John R Walker travels Australia incessantly, looking, hiking, sitting, and climbing the parts of the country he wants to paint. He needs the physical feel, touch, and smell of the land to capture its unique qualities before creating his large paintings on his Braidwood studio floor in New South Wales.
Nearly burnt out of his home by the 2019/20 Summer Bushfires, Walker immediately made the fires and bush devastation the focus of his next exhibition, Fireground. The Flinders Ranges, Braidwood, Mt Canobolas, the Hay Plains, and the Hunter Valley have all featured in recent exhibitions over a highly significant thirty-five-year career. While Streeton, Fairweather, and Williams were initial influences, it is clear that the impact of Aboriginal First Nation artists and their work over the past thirty years has unlocked and shaped his approach towards landscape.
John R Walker, Dawn, Oratunga, 2023, archival oil on polyester, 168.5 × 212cm; Vinbana-Yura-Mulka (Breakneck Gorge) I, 2023, archival oil on polyester, 260 × 198cm; Gaanha-bula Frost II, 2023, archival oil on polyester, 91 × 122cm; Gaanha-bula Dusk I, 2023, archival oil on polyester, 198 × 259cm;Two Brothers, Gaanha-bula I, 2023, archival oil on polyester, 213 × 200cm. Courtesy the artist and Utopia Art Sydney
Andrew Sayers wrote in 2007, “John R Walker’s paintings are about seeing they embody an ever-present sense of curiosity and responsiveness. Yet they are also about feeling, what it is like to be there. Like all truly authentic landscape art, we feel that the artist has experienced things, and he points them out, yet it is nature itself that speaks to us, both of its presence and its strangeness.”
John R Walker drawing on riverbed Pitcairn, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Utopia Art Sydney
As one of Australia’s most senior and accomplished artists, Walker has had forty-two solo exhibitions and numerous group shows, and his work is collected by every major private and public institution and collection in Australia. In November, Orange Regional Gallery in New South Wales opens a major exhibition of Walker’s paintings, with Utopia Art Sydney holding a simultaneous commercial solo show, John R Walker: Gaanha-bula, where seasonal changes and differences in times of day are captured in a series of paintings of Gaanha-bula (Mt Canobolas).
johnrwalker.com.au
utopiaartsydney.com.au
sydneycontemporary.com.au
