This summer The Dock presents ‘John Walker: Painter’, a major exhibition of the artist’s work in Ireland. John Walker (b. Birmingham, 1939) is a monumental figure in contemporary painting: a ‘painter’s painter’; an artist whose work has been as daring in its innovation as it has in its incorporation of the history of painting Walker is a figure represented in major collections throughout the world, a highly regarded and influential teacher and a painter whose work embraces Australian, European and North American influences. Though John Walker was born in Birmingham and was associated with British art early in his career (he represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in 1972), he left for New York in the early 70s, where his work was warmly received by the New York critics. Walker then moved on to Australia, where he became Dean of the School of Art, Victoria College in Melbourne and where he was deeply influenced by Aboriginal and Australian art and culture. Walker now divides his time between Boston, where he is Director of Graduate Painting at Boston University and Maine, where he paints outdoors in the rugged coastal landscape. We hope that artists and art lovers from all over Ireland and further afield will make the trip to Carrick-on-Shannon this summer and take advantage of this rare opportunity to view John Walker: Painter.

John Walker was born in Birmingham, England in 1939 and studied art at Birmingham School of Art and Acadamié de la Grand Chaumière, Paris. His work is held in many public collections worldwide including The Australian National Gallery, Canberra; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, The British Museum, and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. John Walker is represented by Knoedler Gallery in New York and Nielsen Gallery, Boston

www.thedock.ie

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.