Caroline Walls: Painting Now 2024

The opening of Painting Now will see the curtain rise on an exquisite new series by Caroline Walls, whose graceful paintings have amassed a passionate following among collectors, aesthetes and the design cognoscenti in Australia and beyond. Threaded with her reflections on the connections that form between women, her new works move gracefully between figurative and symbolic modes, their sumptuousness and subtle drama tempered by a restrained tonal palette that lends a mood of soft-edged elegance.

“I embrace limitation, working with a refined, reductive palette of only three paint colours: midnight blue-black, golden ochre and titanium white,” says Walls, whose work honours the richness and depth of women’s experiences, evoking the tenderness and strength that colours the bonds between women and gives their dynamic a transformative charge. “Through the considered mixing of these three hues, I craft a spectrum of subtle tones that aim to breathe life into my compositions, each one resonating with a quiet intensity.”

Drapery recurs through the artist’s Painting Now series, both with pictures in which figures gently embrace and in more ambiguous compositions where gathered pools of flowing fabric gesture to rich emotional worlds even in the body’s absence. “The fabric takes on a life of its own, embodying the presence, movement and emotion of the figure,” says Walls, who is a finalist in this year’s Rick Amor Drawing Award.

Dancing between the seen and unseen, the tangible and symbolic, these elements are described by the artist as both literal and metaphorical veils, “representing the layers of experience, secrecy and revelation that define women’s lives.” Works from Walls’s series are now on display at Michael Reid Sydney, where they can be previewed and acquired prior to this year’s Painting Now.

For more, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au