Kelley Walker: Direct Drive

In September 2016, CAM will present the first US survey exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Kelley Walker. Georgia-born and New York–based, Walker leverages issues of identity politics and social constructs to unpack American pop culture. Culling imagery from sources including contemporary print advertising and canonical post-war artworks, he interrogates the ways a single image can migrate into any number of cultural contexts.

Walker’s exhibition will be installed in the entirety of the museum, including the outdoor courtyard, lobby, and all traditional gallery spaces. The exhibition features many of Walker’s major bodies of work, including his Black Star Press Series, CD-ROM Works, Recycling Series, Brick Paintings, and Volkswagen Series, questioning the ways alteration and assimilation play into the image-saturated American quotidian, celebrity culture, and our visual vernacular at large.

Kelley Walker (b. 1969, Columbus, Georgia) received a BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1995, and currently lives in New York. Recent group exhibitions featuring Walker’s work have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; Museum for Modern Art, Oslo; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; National Museum of China, Beijing; Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao amongst others. Solo exhibitions have been held at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester; The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria; Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels; Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Wiels–Centre dʼArt Contemporain, Brussels; and Le Magasin–Centre National dʼArt Contemporain, Grenoble. In 2005, a work from his schema series was featured on the cover of the April issue of Artforum. Articles regarding Walker’swork have been featured in several seminal publications including Artforum, ArtNews, Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, Parkett and The New York Times.

Kelley Walker: Direct Drive is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Jeffrey Uslip, Chief Curator.