Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Video, photography, performance, music, sculpture
Website: richardtwalker.net
Richard T. Walker was born in 1977 in Shrewsbury, England, and has lived and worked in San Francisco since the mid-2000s. He received a BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University College in 1999 and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London in 2005. He is represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and James Cohan Gallery in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the KADIST Foundation in San Francisco and Paris, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21) in Düsseldorf. He is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artadia Award (2009), and a Kala Art Institute Fellowship. He has been an Irvine Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center and a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Walker works across video, photography, music, sculpture, and performance — typically all at once, in works that refuse to separate these elements — to explore solitude, human nature, and the experience of the individual within the vast landscapes of the American West. His practice is steeped in the tradition of German Romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich’s rückenfigur — the lone figure facing away — is a direct precursor) and British land art, but arrives somewhere entirely contemporary: playful, self-aware, and quietly melancholic. He frequently appears in his own work in a red shirt — a nod to John Constable’s characteristic use of carmine pigment — jumping on trampolines toward mountains, holding cut-out engravings of peaks in front of their real counterparts, pressing keyboards against rocks, playing guitar and singing in the desert.
His work interrogates the gap between expectation and experience: the myth of the American West versus its reality, the unattainability of the mountain summit versus the desire to reach it. Sound is inseparable from image in his practice — guitar recordings play through speakers embedded in photograph frames, Casiotone notes sustain in empty gallery spaces, his own voice layers into multi-track harmonies. SFMOMA’s catalogue essay describes the work as drawing a parallel between being alone in wilderness and being in intimate love — both situations that encourage “a micro and macro delineation of self.”
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