Vanishing Point 11 (Rubens)

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

This work is one of two in the Collection from Barbara Walker’s Vanishing Point series. Walker works primarily through drawing and painting, with issues of belonging, power, visibility, and representation central to her practice. In this series, Walker turns her gaze to the Western European artistic canon. She takes as her starting point historic paintings housed in major museums in the once Imperial capitals of London and Amsterdam. She draws our attention to paintings by acclaimed and revered artists who have depicted, within the scenes on their canvases, people of African origin – often in the role of slaves, servants or attendants. But rather than repeat these depictions, Walker offers us a reinterpretation of these works, printing the White figures without ink, a process termed blind embossing, to leave her viewer with tactile white outlines on white paper. Meanwhile, she renders the Black figures within the scene in graphite, bringing their personalities to life.
Vanishing Point offers her viewers an alternative gaze with which to take in these historic paintings. Her works leave us with question marks, inviting in a closer look to reconsider what is present and absent – in these works, and around us – in what we see as a society, or don’t. Most clearly, the works present us with a reversal of the conventional value placed on the characters within these paintings to foreground the visibility of the Black figures – figures who, in the museums that the works she has referenced hang in, may barely have been noticed.
Both works from this series in the Collection allude to paintings in the collection of museums in London. This work was made in reference to the painting A Roman Triumph by the Flemish painter Peter Paul Reubens (1577-1640), which is in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

Barbara Walker (born 1964) was born in Birmingham. She has remarked that her experiences growing up in that city ‘directly shaped a practice concerned with issues of class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging’. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Whitworth Art Gallery (2023), Turner Contemporary (2019), Jerwood Gallery (2018), Midlands Arts Centre (2016), and the James Hockey Gallery, at Creative Arts in Farnham (2015). Her works have been included in significant group exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including at Tate Britain (2021), Lahore Biennale, Pakistan ( 2020), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019), MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen ( 2018), the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), Modern Art Oxford (2018), and the Dakar Biennale, Senegal (2018). She was awarded the Bridget Riley Fellowship in 2020 at The British School at Rome and, in 2017, the inaugural Evelyn Williams Drawing Award, an award connected with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. In 2019, Walker was awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours list for services to British Art.

Places

Subjects

elephant, human figure, figure (gender nonspecific)

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), drawing (Art object type), print (as object name), embossing, photogravure, polymer photogravure, cotton paper, Somerset Satin

Artist

Barbara Walker (1964 - )

Title

Vanishing Point 11 (Rubens)

Series Title

Vanishing Point

Date

2018

Medium

graphite on embossed paper

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, March 2019

Provenance

The artist; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 2019

GAC number

18808