In London earlier this month, a painting by the Scottish artist Caroline Walker titled Threshold (2014) sold at Phillips for $1.1 million, more than six times its estimate, setting a new record for the artist. The sale came just days after another work of hers, The Puppeteer (2014), set a record at Christie’s, selling for over $800,000.
The paintings are typical of Walker’s practice, depicting female figures performing household tasks or lounging in backyards, often seen from afar, as though from the view of a stranger looking through a window. While images of women at work are age-old in the art historical canon, Walker has made a name for herself in the UK art gallery scene with them. Her work has risen in the market alongside that ascent. Artsy, an online aggregator of art sales data, recently cited Walker as a commercial force: in 2022, 32 of her works sold at auction.
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In London, Walker provided a case study for current market forces. At 41, Walker does not fit as either an emerging figure or as a late career canonical artist, two categories that account for a bulk of auction sales. Instead, attention around her work has grown along a different, but still familiar archetype. Her work is tinted with feminist leanings and contains references to canonical male artists, features that adhere to a commercial formula predicated on the tastes of a small minority of collectors.
Critics have compared Walker’s work to that in male-dominated areas of the canon, like the Dutch old masters, and to artists David Hockney and Eric Fischl, figures well-known to UK and West Coast audiences. The latter two she cites as references whose works “originate from the male perspective,” Jorg Grimm, an Amsterdam-based dealer who represents Walker, told ARTnews.
“She invites the viewer to consider a female perspective in art [that] might offer different insights into the embodied experiences of women to that of her male peers,” he added. In an online mention of Walker’s work, one of her collectors, Dutch developer Edwin Oostmeijer, said that what appealed to him about her work is its “staged” aspect.
The female gaze, a tagline that is often attached to the viewpoint in Walker’s work, has become something of a commercial feature that often underpins market-ready paintings by women artists. London-based Phillips specialist Olivia Thornton told ARTnews that private collectors are still “filling gaps” in their art holdings, as calls for addressing historical blind spots in art acquisitions have circulated since the onset of the pandemic. Specialists have speculated that the trend has driven interest in artists like Walker, whose perspective, according to Thornton, feels like an update on old norms.
Robert Manley, Phillips deputy chairman, once described this behind-the-scenes dynamic in a post-sale press conference, responding to a question about why the works of New York figurative painter Emily Mae Smith, described in the New Yorker as “tartly feminist,” were rising in value. Manley remarked that, for collectors, Smith’s work, depicting anthropomorphized broomsticks that are satirical plays on sex and gender, resonated in its campy references to Surrealists.
Painters like Hilary Pecis and Shara Hughes—who both reference Fauvists like Henri Matisse and have attracted bidding from Asia—have been the subjects of familiar buzz that underlies these investment-driven auction sales.
Hugo Cobb, a London-based specialist for Sotheby’s, told ARTnews that Walker’s appeal may be in her responding to a thread in British figurative painting that’s long been gendered. “She’s taking on a very long tradition of quite macho art,” Cobb said.
Elsewhere in the London sales staged earlier this month, the male gaze still loomed large. The Sotheby’s catalogue described a 1997 painting by British painter Lucian Freud depicting his adult daughter, titled Ib Reading, as being reflective of the father of fourteen’s “paternal absence”; it sold for approximately $20.5 million on March 1. Freud, whose work is repeatedly used as a value anchor in UK evening sales, was the subject of an $86 million auction record at Christie’s this past November.
Walker’s audiences appear to be growing abroad. In addition to the UK and Europe, Walker has buyers from the United States and China. In other words, it’s a “global audience,” said Thornton, market-speak for an artist whose following spans the trade’s main commercial hubs. Meanwhile, her work was the subject of “Women Observed,” a show that ended February 12 at the K11 Foundation in Shanghai, one outpost in an empire of commercial art spaces built by real estate developer Adrien Cheng that’s been described as akin to an art mall. This appeal to collectors internationally, Grimm said, “is no exaggeration.”
Despite the surging interest, Walker has not been “crashed” into the market, according to Cobb, as many emergent artists seeing record prices have been as of late. This past October, just before the K11 show opened, demand for her work jumped: at a Phillips sale, Walker’s 2017 canvas Night Scenes sold for £516,600 ($577,000), five times its estimate. Only hours later, at the newly minted Sotheby’s “Now” sale, established to capitalize on demand for artists whose waitlists on the primary market are growing, bidders drove Walker’s Palm Springs–inspired Indoor Outdoor (2015) to £529,200 ($587,677).
“Usually when there’s a major show coming up like that,” said Cobb, “the real rush on pricing comes just before the show opens rather than just after.”
But auction sales have only loose correlations with what’s going on in the museum sphere. Whether or not UK institutions are addressing feminist issues explored by contemporary artists with real fervor remains less clear. This past November, the Art Newspaper raised the question of whether British museums are failing to respond to public discourse around violence against women in their programming by overlooking conceptual artists whose work focuses on the issue.
On the auction circuit, where figurative painting remains king in contemporary sales, these works tend to package social issues circulating in the institutional sphere more palatably. And because auction results are not metrics that correlate to institutional credibility, they’re commonly viewed as distractions from the milestones an artist reaches midcareer. A pivotal show in 2013 at London’s Pitzhanger Manor may have put Walker on the map, but since then, according to Thornton, interest from collectors has been steady.
“I try not to pay too much attention,” Walker remarked about her auction prices earlier this month to ARTnews. “My focus is with the work.”
Cobb sees Edward Hopper in Walker’s works too, which may have helped her visibility in London. Hopper was recently the subject of a blockbuster, “Edward Hopper’s New York,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his work was invoked in the early days of the pandemic as a meme for widespread feelings of isolation. In 2018 Hopper’s name became synonymous with financial trophy when his 1929 canvas Chop Suey sold for $91.9 million.
The comparison is code for another value-add here. There is, Cobb said, “a kind of glamour” in Walker’s work, similar to Hopper’s, where views of solitary figures seen from a distance, in nighttime swimming pools and backyards of American suburbs, feel “very familiar to us.”
Despite Walker’s being active for more than a decade, her work remains “sought after” among UK collectors, according to Thornton. What drives those results, according to her, is “unmet demand where collectors are finding it difficult to access works.”