Lot Essay
Within five years of his first exhibition Walker had been chosen to show in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The paintings he showed there were on rectangular canvases (much of the earlier work had been on shaped ones), with certain identical forms presented almost as if on the apron of a stage. A shape like an elipse with square ends appeared in many guises. Often two differently coloured versions of it would be presented side by side, as enigmatic and as weighty as Roc's eggs against a field of broken colour that seemed to be claiming our attention in quite a different way. It was as though unified, large-format American paintings were being split up, their elements turned against each other, and as a result energised and made accessible to new content.