Born 1975 in London, Stephen Walter is an artist whose practice is informed by a fascination with the topography of environments and the semiotics of the natural and the human cultures that inhabit them. His obsessive drawing techniques make each work an intricate and layered world in-itself.
Walter’s multi-disciplinary practice mainly consists of image-making, and incorporates drawing, painting, photography, collage, montage, animation, sculpture and digital techniques. His works are re-representations of real and invented places featuring arrangements and constellations of natural, physical and artificial elements. Through a tangle of words, symbols, graphic forms, concepts, histories, epithets, hidden meanings and autobiographical references, his works explore the phenomenon whereby cultural residues inhabit certain locations; ideas and ideologies evolve into places and into symbols. They grow and gather within the wider ecology of other polemic elements to form a balance of the whole. Walter’s form of mark-making and repetition merges with a wider language of signs and symbols, becoming an agent in the politics of space, while examining the juxtapositions of personal and collective experiences of place.
Walter has exhibited extensively internationally, with work featured in group shows at Somerset House, UK; Dallas Contemporary, TX, US; Spaceship, Tel Aviv, IL and Museum aan de Stroom, BE, among others . He has presented solo exhibitions at Shapero Modern, London, 2016; Londonewcastle Space, London with TAG Fine Arts, 2013; The Courtauld Institute, 2009; The Crypt St Pancras Church, 2008; The Royal Academy Of Arts Café, 2007; The Drawing Gallery, 2005; and Deutsche Bank, London, 2004. Awards include a Fellowship in Printmaking at Royal Academy Schools, 2005-07; Jerwood Drawing Prize 2004 (2nd Prize); Tim Mara Charitable Trust, 2001; Suny Purchase Travel Award, US, 2001; and Drawing Prize, RCA, London, 2001. His work is held in collections including the British Library; British Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum; Houses of Parliament Museum; British Government Collection; Deutsche Bank, London; Trussardi Foundation, Milan; University of Manchester Library Collection; London Borough of Barnet; RCA Print and Drawing Archive.
