Ben Walker

STO LAT is pleased to present Lonely Kings, an exhibition of new paintings by Ben Walker.

On view are a series of haunted mediated landscapes. Parapets, mountains, and lonely roads appear as images of an unidentifiable past. Rendered unspecific, these subjects derive from collective memories distributed through television, albums, and magazines and suggest a shared conception of the ever-present past.

Walker’s process is meditative. Building up and selectively subtracting layers of oil paint leaving traces and shadows, Walker evokes memetic processes. With their media source material, the works suggest a vision of shared memory resonant with hauntology, a Derridean neologism describing the influence of an atemporal cultural force. In these paintings the past is neither history or mythology, it appears as a disruptive constant without an apparent agenda.

Ben Walker (b. 1974) studied at Sheffield Hallam University and Wimbledon School of Art. He has exhibited widely, including at Transition Gallery and Charlie Smith London. He was the 2012 recipient of the Jack Goldsmith Painting Prize and was included in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019. Lonely Kings is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.