Lot 61
STEVE WALKER(1961-2012)Birds Eye View, 2009
13 – 27 February 2025, 17:00 PST
Online, Los AngelesUS$200 - US$500
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STEVE WALKER(1961-2012)
Birds Eye View, 2009
giclee print on paper
22 x 28 in.
55.9 x 71.1 cm.
This work is from an edition of two hundred.
giclee print on paper
22 x 28 in.
55.9 x 71.1 cm.
This work is from an edition of two hundred.
Footnotes
Provenance
Courtesy of Donald Frey, Jim Pretlow, and Hamilton Selway, West Hollywood
"As a homosexual, I have been moved, educated, and inspired by works that deal with a heterosexual context. Why would I assume that a heterosexual would be incapable of appreciating work that speaks to common themes in life, as seen through my eyes as a gay man? If the heterosexual population is unable to do this, then the loss is theirs, not mine."
—Steve Walker
Steve Walker passed away at his home in Costa Rica on Jan 4,2012, at age 50. He was best known for his haunting and poignant acrylic portraits of beautiful young men (solo and in pairs), often done in muted shades. "Some colors are very exciting to me," he once told James Lyman, a Massachusetts gallery owner and Walker's art executor and trustee. "While others are quite offensive. Painting flesh is very exciting to me because of the huge variations possible within a very small color range."
According to friends, Walker was strongly influenced by Renaissance Italian artist Caravaggio – especially in his use of shadow to show the contours of the young male form. For his subjects, he chose to paint gay men, depicting the struggles and joys the gay community lived through in his lifetime, from the fight for sexual liberation to the devastation brought about by HIV and AIDS. Walker believed his subjects were universal, touching on themes of love, hate, pain, joy, beauty, loneliness, attraction, hope, despair, life, and death.