Alexandre Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by John Walker (b. 1939). The show includes eight large-scale paintings (84 x 66 and 72 x 60 inches) and related smaller works completed over the past two years. Three earlier paintings (2002, 2004 and 2007) are on view in an adjacent second gallery along with a selection of small-scaled “Bingo” card paintings on board. This exhibit marks the gallery’s second for the British-born American, and its first one-person show in its newly expanded gallery space at 724 Fifth Avenue.

For over fifteen years Walker’s abstract paintings have referenced the landscape and seacoast around his studio in mid-coast Maine. Water, trees, shore, rocks, mud, sky, sun and moon – with an emphasis on the physicality of the natural world – are among his subjects. Through Walker’s extended emersion in this landscape, a personal iconography has emerged – symbols representing the cycles, patterns and elements of nature. Zigzags, stripes, dots, circles, organic and geometric shapes, and flat areas of color are painted with a bold deliberateness in combination with naturalistic flourishes and areas of deep space. All is unified by a rich painterly surface that has characterized Walker’s work for decades. Recent titles include Black Flow, Cascade, Passage, The Point in Bloom and Sea Smoke.

In 2014 the critic John Goodrich wrote of Walker’s work:

Few painters have expanded the original impulses of Abstract Expressionism in more directions than John Walker. During the course of his half-century of painting, he has incorporated into his canvases written poetry, concise renderings of skulls and allusions to both aboriginal art and the old masters. . . . Although moodily abstracted, his images from the last decade have been consistently inspired by observations of the real. His urgent stokes and brooding color, moreover, reveal a certain discipline of form; their forces build in ways that create discrete, tangible presences in his paintings. . . . One senses land against shimmering expanses, the remoteness of the sun and sky, and the isolation of a tree-covered island.