WALKER KARA (1969 ) Portfolio entitled Testimony

Sale 2170 - Lot 117

Price Realized: $ 10,200

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000

WALKER, KARA (1969- )
Portfolio entitled "Testimony." With 5 images of her graphic, black cut-out silhouettes and projections. Photogravures, image size 6 1/2x8 3/4 to 16x21 1/2 inches (16.5x22.2 to 40.6x54.6 cm.); sheet size 22 1/4x30 3/4 inches (56.5x78.1 cm.), with Walker's initials, date and edition notations 4/40, in pencil, on recto; each framed. 2005

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Additional Details

From the Lower East Side Printshop, New York; to the current owner.
The work of Kara Walker consists of a complex layering of internal and external struggles of the emotional, physical, personal, sexual and racial found throughout literature, culture and history. Throughout it all, the single aspect of power unites the themes in her creations. Perhaps best known for her cut-paper silhouettes, she first started exploring this medium around 1993 while a graduate student at Rhode Island School of Design. Silhouettes were marveled at as the three-dimensional world could be reduced so convincingly into a two-dimensional form. However, Walker''s exaggerated figures are disorienting. Robert Storr stated in his landmark publication, "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" that "more than ever, they appear as shadows without substance, forms without volume, figments of a collective obsession, pure products of hysterical anxiety turned to hysterical, hurt-filled comedy."
To produce the images in this lot, Walker captured and digitally manipulated the images from her 2004 video, "Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions." The artist''s first film is a silent black and white puppet animation that recounts the story of the lynching of a plantation master by his slave lover. Seen in this narration are her most recognized characters, the Auntie, the master, the master''s son and the Negress mistress. The story is set on a cotton plantation that recount how the men, with their physical longings, allow their bodies to find fulfillment in the slave women. When the women refuse to fall immediately back into the caste system, they murder their lovers (masters). Walker''s work often produces strong emotions, ranging from sarcastic humor and elation to shock and shame. In the December 2008 issue of Glamour, Walker was eloquently quoted about her work, "There''s a sweet violence in the act of cutting, of accepting and rejecting social stereotypes."