Ben Walker’s paintings conjure residual hauntings, exploring the recurring dreams the figures inhabit. The layers of pigment build surreal dreamscapes, rejecting definition in favor of fluctuating densities of color and shadow. His works are lamentations– for lost time, experience, aesthetics morphed beyond comprehension and locked in an increasingly inaccessible past. Far beyond simply conjuring ghosts of our past, the paintings speak to the phenomenological experience of nostalgia as a device for positioning ourselves within the world, building microcosmic realities in the surfaces of the work, with their own circumstances playing out in allegorical narratives scrubbed in hazy pigment.
Ben Walker (b. 1974, Cheshire, UK) received his MA in Fine Art from Wimbledon School of Art, London and BA in Fine Art from Sheffiled Hallam University, Sheffield, UK. He has recently exhibited at Sto Lat, New York, NY; One Wall Gallery, Eugene, OR; Jack House Gallery, Portsmouth, UK; and CIMCOT, London, UK. His group exhibition venues include the Barbican Arts Trust, London; Zabludowicz Collection, London; The Art Pavilion, Mile End, London, UK; Terrace Gallery, London; and The ARB, University of Cambridge. In 2012, he was the recipient of the Jack Goldsmith Painting Prize. Walker lives and works in Kent, UK.