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Kara Walker

The Invisible Beauty, 2001

Information

Location Gallery 2
Artist

Kara Walker

*1969, Stockton, USA

lives and works in New York, USA
Title

The Invisible Beauty, 2001
From the eleven-part series/ Aus der elfteiligen Serie American Primitives,2001
Medium Gouache on paper, mounted on masonite
Copyright © Kara Walker
Exhibition number AW102

Audio guide

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The shadowy outline of a woman within the suggestion of a landscape. Everything around her dissolves into a pale pink mist that contrasts sharply with the foreground, with its defined vegetation rendered in solid black. The lower part of the female figure, her clothing, and her bare feet, like the vegetation, are depicted in the style of a paper cut-out. Like a black foundation that anchors or incarcerates her. Is she breaking loose from that foundation? Is she weighed down? Is she being transformed? Into another personality, or into a fading memory?

In the late 18th and early 19th century, before the invention of photography, cutting paper profiles was a popular leisure activity for the upper middle-class and aristocracy in Europe and North America. Walker rose to international prominence in the 1990s with works that appropriated this technique, but delivered an alternative, brutal reflection on the past.

Kara Walker's works are often allegorical and enigmatic. They evoke memories of fairy tales, romantic sketches, whimsical dreamscapes or nightmarish visions. Often, they are inspired by slave testimonials and contain sexualised violent imagery.

The artist describes herself as an ‘unreliable narrator’. In the drawings you see here, she combines historical facts with myths, folklore and images from her imagination to explore issues of identity and history. The works simultaneously refer to the antebellum slave era of the American South and remind is of the racially polarized state of America today.

Further artworks from this exhibition