John Walker
Walker was a Gregory Fellow at Leeds University (1967-1969), after which he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship and visited the United States. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. In 1972
he represented Britain in the Venice Biennale.
The artist has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in NY; The Phillips Collection in DC; The Tate Gallery, London; The Hayward Gallery in London;
The Kunstverein, Hamburg; The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia; and others.
Juggernaut
Walker's print relates to a set of paintings entitled Juggernaut that began in 1973. These paintings collaged sections of metallic-looking canvas on a massive scale. Chalk-dust and gel added atmospherics while conspicuous handling (developed in his immediately previous blackboard pieces) played with the sense of shape.
Walker recounts a formative experience: "As a young man, I had gone to Amsterdam to look at Van Gogh, actually. I saw the
Rembrandts, including the painting that is still the most important painting to me — 'The Jewish Bride.’ It just touched me so. It is truly one of the great romantic paintings in the world. I came out
from the Rembrandt painting, and then I went to the Stedelijk. I’d been trained at that point just in figurative art. For the four years previously, I’d been in a life room. And I saw this painting, a
white square on a white square. I didn’t know what it was, but I got the same emotional take that I got from the Rembrandt. It blew me away, took me off balance. I turned away, came back. I had no
way of dealing with it intellectually. I’d never been faced with avant-garde art. I didn’t do anything about it. But several years later, I read that Malevich, when asked what his ambition was for painting,
said it was to imbue the square with feeling. Well, that’s what Rembrandt did. So the connection was immediate. Then I didn’t have this problem of why I liked Rembrandt and why I liked certain contemporary
art, why I grew to like Jackson Pollock. That is what they were doing: they were imbuing the square with feeling. I’d never read that, never heard of that, but it seemed to be right on."