?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
KARA WALKER (1969 - ) Kneeling Silohuette.
Paper cut-out mounted on cotton canvas, painted black, 1995. 255x255 mm; 10x10 inches. Signed and dated in ink on the canvas verso.
Provenance: Ex-collection Wooster Gardens, New York.
Kara Walker has introduced a unique voice in contemporary art with her appropriation of the 18th and 19th-century practice of cutting paper portrait silhouettes, recreating narratives from the Antebellum South that re-define racial stereotypes and plantation mythologies. In the 1997 catalogue for her exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker describes how "The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does. So I saw the silhouette and the stereotype as linked. Of course, while the stereotype, or the emblem, can communicate with a lot of people, and a lot of people can understand it, the other side is that it also reduces differences, reduces diversity to that stereotype." In 2006 the artist was invited to juxtapose works from the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with her own art work as a response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.
