Artists

Ella Walker

Press release

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by artist Ella Walker at its Savile Row gallery.

For her first exhibition with the gallery, Walker intricately weaves imagery from broad swathes of history and popular culture – medieval manuscripts to modern ballet, the cinema of Fellini and Pasolini to fetishwear magazines – to produce emotive, stage-like scenes. Interrogating traditional depictions of women throughout art history, Walker’s paintings offer a counterpoint to the traditional casting of female subjects as exemplars of vice and virtue. Freed from this moral framework, her figures are recalibrated, reentering the world of images as complex, contradictory, unruly beings.

Characters who have been overlooked or undermined traditionally now take centre stage: the stock commedia dell’arte character of the servetta, the jealous crone, the madwoman, the glee-maiden and sorceress; in short, uncontainable, insolent women whose example we are not meant to follow. Cheeky, mask-like faces jeer out from the canvas; a fist pummels the floor in a state of protest. In The Bridled Sweeties (2024), a Maria Callas lookalike rolls her eyes back into her head, in what could be an expression of delirium, orgasm, or simply boredom.