In recent years Antiguan artist Frank Walter (1926-2009), has emerged as one of the most distinctive and intriguing voices of Caribbean art of the last 50 years. At the 2017 edition of the Venice Biennale - where Walter’s work was presented as Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural pavilion - Hans-Ulrich Obrist described the artist as “a pioneer” author of “an unbelievable body of work, which has not been seen so far […] He was the Leonardo da Vinci of Antigua”. In 2020, a major retrospective of several hundred works was staged at MMK Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt.
There were no exhibitions of his work during his lifetime, other than those he assembled in his studio and home, but he made extravagant plans for how and where his work might be presented. In his writings, he described the way people would move through a light-filled gallery with paintings on the walls and sculpture in the centre of the space "creating dynamic movement and flow."
In our exhibition for the Edinburgh Art Festival, we paid tribute to his vision in presenting his carvings of whales, fish and birds alongside his previously unseen series of ‘Spool’ paintings. The small, circular paintings, that are amongst the most visionary paintings of Walter’s career and provide a compelling lens through which to witness the workings of his inner eye.
As art historian and chronicler of Walter’s life Barbara Paca writes in a new book, published to this summer, “Walter’s spools reveal themselves as portals, portholes, telescopes and microscopes. They offer an artistic lexicon of this painting career, ranging from figuration to total abstraction. They are his most direct and focussed paintings, with each work going straight to the essential essence of the subject portrayed… they are amongst his most sublime and exquisite works.”
