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Poland: From Romanticism to Kitsch
Robert Walker

January 19 to February 29, 1996

After having walked the streets of New York, Montreal and many other cities, Robert Walker wandered through Warsaw, and other regions of Poland. The same atmosphere seems to prevail everywhere. American Blues or European elegy : it's all the same. The world has become a vast shopping centre. People occupy a corner of land which seems to reject them.

In Warsaw, Walker draws our attention to Cricoland, an itinerate Luna Park, and a German one at that.
The fair is erected in the middle of a city haunted by it's tragic history. The multicoloured stands and sinister rides become symbols of a planet-wide malaise. Here, more than anywhere else, you notice it. In a sense, America is Disneyland, everywhere!

In Poland, Cricoland acts as a stark contrast to the aristocratic past, evidenced by formal parks and romantic avenues, too beautiful to be real. They have become a simulacrum of what they were.

Cricoland strikes one as a new labour camp where the former socialist worker acts out the American Dream. Through the blatant use of bright red and pink, the photographs ironically comment on the implosion of the Communist empire. Robert Walker offers us a lesson in formal composition in these superbly framed photographs, but also one in morality. These violent contrasts between composition and colour, between the silent park and the kitsch uproar, indicate a certain form of alienation. The old ghost of Marx still moves about eerily in this world disenchanted with the universal reign of capitalism.

—Michel Denée

 
Biography

Robert Walker was born in Montreal in 1945. He graduated from Sir George Williams University in 1969 where he studied painting. Although self-trained as a photographer, he participated in photography workshops given by Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand. In 1978, he moved to New York City where he lived and worked for ten years.
The results of this period were published by Oxford University Press in a book titled New York Inside Out, with an introduction by William S. Burroughs. In 1980, he was commissioned by Columbia Pictures to document the making of the John Huston film Annie, for publication in the book Annie on Camera. He has participated in several major exhibitions including Color as Form: a History of Color Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester; Personal Choice: A Celebration of Twentieth Century Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Color in the Street, California Museum of Photography; New American Photographs, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University and New York: The City and it's People, Beijing Workers Cultural Palace, China.

In Montreal, he is represented by Galerie Christiane Chassay.

 

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