Andrew Edlin Gallery Presents Works by Abraham Lincoln Walker for ADAA: The Art Show 2024
ADAA: The Art Show 2024
Abraham Lincoln Walker
Park Avenue Armory, Booth B5
October 29 – November 2, 2024
Abraham Lincoln Walker, Untitled, 1982. Oil on board, 19 x 24 inches
New York, NY – October 22, 2024 – Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of works by previously unknown artist Abraham Lincoln Walker (1921-1993) for ADAA: The Art Show 2024.
Abraham Lincoln Walker was born in Henderson, Kentucky and moved to East St. Louis, Illinois at the age of seven. Through his early years and much of his adult life, the city was a thriving industrial and creative center, home to many artistic talents, among them, Josephine Baker, Tina Turner, Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Katherine Dunham, who founded the Performing Arts Training Center there, and Miles Davis, who lived just around the corner from the artist’s house on Kansas Avenue.
A house painter by trade, Walker, like many self-taught artists, started out by imitating painting styles and making reproductions, working to understand basic palette and composition techniques. He leaned towards representational depictions of the neighborhood, his canvases bursting with odes to Black culture —bright colors and brushstrokes that moved with the syncopation and groove of jazz.
Much of Walker’s work from the late 1960s through early 1970s features elongated and masked figures displaying ambiguous relationships and gestures, situated in desolate landscapes. His deeply affective dystopian visions vacillate between the world outside his studio, the biblical world deeply rooted in his upbringing, and, increasingly, a world of his own making. In many of his paintings from the 1970s onward, his figures become fragmented and distorted, overwhelmed by a visionary, celestial space in which faces, limbs, and other barely identified human forms are entangled in the fibrous tentacles of a living world, but fully capable of communicating their psychic bearing.
Well-ensconced in the creative community of East St. Louis, Walker participated in a handful of regional exhibitions, but he nevertheless remained somewhat aloof and enigmatic throughout his life.
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About Andrew Edlin Gallery
Established in 2001, Andrew Edlin Gallery gained early recognition exhibiting the works of both emerging and seminal self-taught American artists, and European art brut masters. In 2006, the gallery was awarded exclusive representation of the Henry Darger Estate.
In subsequent years, AEG has championed significant yet under-recognized artists from the 20th and 21st centuries and has steadily produced critically acclaimed exhibitions featuring the works of both trained and untrained artists, including Thornton Dial, Ralph Fasanella (estate), Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (estate), Marcel Storr (estate), Beverly Buchanan (estate), Paulina Peavy (estate), Spain Rodriguez (estate), Joe Coleman, Tom Duncan, Karla Knight, Terence Koh, Dan Miller, Esther Pearl Watson, Melvin Way, George Widener and Domenico Zindato. Committed to documentation and research, AEG has produced publications for Darger, Dial, Duncan, Fasanella, Von Bruenchenhein, Storr, Knight, Peavy, and Zindato, and is in the midst of a major monograph project for Buchanan.
AEG has participated in Art Basel Miami Beach, Paris+ Par Art Basel, the Armory Show, Frieze (NY and LA), FIAC, Art Brussels, The Art Show (ADAA), Independent and the Outsider Art Fair, among other art fairs. The gallery is a member of the Art Dealers Association of America.
For more information, visit https://www.edlingallery.com/.
Media Contacts:
For interviews, background, and images, please contact:
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