ART CITIES:N.York-Frank Walter
The American artist Frank Walter created a vast body of work that encompasses a variety of media, styles, and formats. His paintings range from highly individualistic, vividly colored landscapes, to formally inventive and probing portraits, to systematic, abstract compositions, all rendered in the artist’s own absorbing palette and distinctive visual style.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
The exhibition “By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter” centers on Frank Walter’s relationship to Antigua through a range of works that express his intimate connection to nature, landscape, and place. Walter was born Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter, on Horsford Hill, Antigua, in 1926. From a young age, Walter’s intellect was apparent to his family, and he quickly gained the admiration and respect of his local community. Feeling a deep connection to his native land, Walter studied agriculture and the sugar industry—the basis of Antigua’s economy—and at the age of twenty-two, he became the first person of color to work as a manager within the Antiguan Sugar Syndicate, where he helped modernize harvesting and production methods and also sought to improve the status and labor conditions of the workers. He spent much of the 1950s traveling and learning advanced agricultural and industrial techniques in England, Scotland, and West Germany. During this time, he experienced the depths of racism and bias against people of color, and he often resorted to working as a day laborer to get by. While in Europe, Walter pursued a variety of creative and artistic outlets, including drawing and painting as well as writing prose, philosophical texts, and poetry. The artist returned to the Caribbean in 1961, where, in addition to painting, drawing, and writing, he began making sculptures, photographs, and sound recordings. In the early 1990s, Walter designed and built his home and studio on Bailey Hill in Antigua, where he spent the remainder of his time in relative isolation, reflecting, writing, and making art inspired by his thoughts, knowledge, journeys, and surroundings. There is no typical Frank Walter. His range as a painter is extensive and unfettered. His perspective is all his own. His oeuvre seems to stand in opposition to the permanent ascriptions he was subjected to throughout his lifetime, with respect to race and nation. His cosmological paintings have a transcendental glow, his abstract works are systematic, the individuality of his figurative painting is captivating, and his landscapes gain strength through their clear abstractions. All his works exhibit an unusual degree of clarity and directness. This sense of focus in his works, which also comes from their small size, offer us a way of approaching them directly. The complexity of Walter’s subject matter is matched by the great variety of his materials. He created works on wood, Masonite, cardboard, paper, linoleum, and the backs of photographs, and he painted and drew with oil paint, tempera, watercolor, crayon, pencil, shellac, and glitter. When he was not painting, he wrote; when he was not writing, he made sound recordings. Walter’s creativity had an unbelievable intensity, which one can see, feel, and sense in his work. It was only in art that he felt liberated: free of the brutality that lay in normative attributions, which was a permanent presence beyond his artistic work. Frank Walter believed that creating art was an inherently subversive act, and one that uniquely enabled him to assert the right to lead his own life, as determined and defined by himself.
Photo: Frank Walter, Untitled (Grey and Red Landscape), n.d., Oil on single-ply cardboard, 17 1/2 x 8 1/8 inches (44.5 x 20.6 cm), Framed: 13 x 22 3/8 inches (33 x 56.8 cm), Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery
Info: Curator: Hilton Als, David Zwirner Gallery, 34 East 69th Street New York, NY, USA, Duration: 2/6-29/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/
