Frank Walter: Pastorale

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Antiguan artist, writer, and polymath Frank Walter (1926–2009) at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. Curated by art historian Barbara Paca, a close friend to the artist and devoted scholar of his work, Pastorale is Walter’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and the first presentation of his work in Asia.

The exhibition will feature paintings and works on paper that exemplify Walter’s rich body of work, which encompasses a variety of media, styles, and formats, including those made on such supports as Polaroid film cartridge boxes, mosquito coil boxes, and fragments of sketchpad covers. Featured will be a group of Caribbean landscapes alongside a selection of small-scale paintings depicting the meadows of Scotland—made from memory to commemorate the time he spent there in 1960—which reveal the artist’s distinctive use of color and his personal vision of the places he lived, traveled, and imagined. As Paca writes in a curatorial statement for the exhibition, “Pastorale presents a new dimension of the vast oeuvre of universal artist Frank Walter. As a recluse, Walter was more at ease in a world where he dwelt as the solitary inhabitant, and he captured every nuance with immediacy and honesty.”1

1 Barbara Paca, “Frank Walter’s Pastorale,” curatorial statement for the exhibition, 2023.

On the cover: Frank Walter outside his photo studio, Antigua, 1990s. © The Family of Frank Walter and Barbara Paca

Source: David Zwirner