Frank Walter
“By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter”
New York, 34 East 69th Street
This focused exhibition follows the solo show of Walter’s work presented at David Zwirner London in 2021 as well as the celebrated retrospectives held at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, in 2020 and the Pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Organized in collaboration with the artist’s family, By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter will center on Walter’s relationship to Antigua through a range of works that express his intimate connection to nature, landscape, and place.
As Hilton Als writes:
I didn’t know a thing about [Frank Walter] that spring day in Venice [in 2017] when I arrived at the Pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda, but it was as if my eyes and my heart recognized him at once. Not only as a master artist, but as a maker of a universe completely his own, grown out of the richness and debris that sometimes characterizes the life of a West Indian island dweller who is not rich, who must make a world out of making do. It seemed to me, that afternoon … that Frank did everything, and wanted to do everything.…
Looking at his paintings, none very large, all detailed, was like looking through a scrim at someone else’s dreams. You could see every line, every color, but you had to peer past his poetic resolve not to tell everything, not to reveal all the world but to show all the world in fragments—a palm tree here, a house there, a dog there, a woman here—because it was truer to what he knew: taking the fragments that life gave him, building on that and making it whole.…
One gets the sense, in looking at Walter’s rivers and sky, that his perspectives were hard-won: he doesn’t just look at a bank and water, he pulls back, rather like a cinematographer—he had a great interest in photography, too—to get at the poetic essence of a scene. This requires aloneness, and silence: you have to listen to your own feet falling as you traverse this or that landscape, looking not for the right moment but for the decisive moment that Henri Cartier-Bresson told us about so long ago, and that remains vibrant in Walter’s work. His work is filled with correct moments, even when the image is obviously a work of the imagination, as in his portraits of people.…
In a way the work is all about him, and how he saw in a very particular way the blood and joy of history as it filled his eyes and shaped his hands and mind [and it] is about the articulation of a particular kind of experience: race without ideology, fantasy without apology, the natural world on its own terms as it meets the particularities of the artist’s eye.
