A Judgement on Paris, 2024

Gansai watercolor on cut paper on mulberry paper
© Kara Walker. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Photo by Jason Wyche.

Since the mid-1990s, Kara Walker has employed the cut-paper silhouette as a signature figurative element in her art to explore intertwined systems of race, sexuality, and violence in the United States. Her work is often characterized by an unconstrained pandemonium and a menacingly comical wit. While her iconic silhouettes are typically made with black paper, beginning in 2024, Walker began to work with sumi-e ink and Gansai watercolors to create her figures, thereby enriching and enhancing the silhouette through vivid hues and textures. Organized as a jumble of intersecting body parts, yet still retaining a strong compositional resolution, Walker’s large-scale collages evoke abstracted panoramas. In doing so, they also take on the history of the sublime and romanticism within landscape art. Many of Walker’s titles allude to grand and sometimes ancient narratives. A Judgement on Paris is a clear nod to a famous episode in Greek mythology: a beauty contest that essentially launched the Trojan War. In this work, Walker shows a legacy of violence and the ongoing relevance of that famed saga.