Artist Ella Walker (b.1993, Manchester, UK) has created two new site-specific commissions for 91Ó°ÊÓ Gallery. The new artworks are be presented in The John Browne Entrance Hall and the Ticketing Hall of 91Ó°ÊÓ Gallery and will be free to visit.
This is the second Courtauld Commission, a series of annual commissions by contemporary artists for 91Ó°ÊÓ Gallery, which launched in 2025 with new works by artist Rachel Jones.
Ella Walker creates monumental canvases that act like dream-like stages. They are dominated by female figures whose gestures and interactions are both familiar and confounding, eschewing expected behaviour and transcending fixed roles.
In Verdaccio Wall (2026), Walker draws on iconography, costume, and poses observed in Gothic sculptures and Renaissance painting as well as popular culture, creating scenes that flicker between time periods. The work depicts a group of women many of whom are smiling, breaking with traditional portraiture. Combining drawing and painting, with graphite often left visible and paint used to produce delicate lines, Walker’s paintings have a matt, chalky quality evocative of frescos.
In The Studio (2026), Walker paints the artist’s studio as a space in which images and memories are gathered in a collage-like process. Walker builds on the subject of the artist’s studio by reimagining Renaissance settings, such as Sandro Botticelli’s prolific workshop and whose use of bold colour, rendering of bodily volume and gesture have been a touchstone for Walker in creating this commission. She is fascinated by the abrupt shift in scale between figures found in his The Trinity with Saints Mary Magdalen and John the Baptist (around 1491-94), on view on the second floor of 91Ó°ÊÓ Gallery – an effect that she deploys in this work to a less exaggerated extent. The street depicted in this work is based on urban sites and architecture, reconstructed from the artist’s memory, combined with found imagery.
Walker lives and works in London. She studied Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art and The Royal Drawing School. Recent solo exhibitions includeÌýIdolâtrie, Le Château – Centre for Contemporary Art and Heritage ofÌýAubenas, France (2025);ÌýThe Romance of the Rose, PilarÌýCorrias, London (2024);ÌýAfter great pain, a formal feeling comes, Casey Kaplan, New York (2024); andÌýChorus,ÌýKestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2023).
Since the transformation of its Gallery in 2021, theÌý°ä´Ç³Ü°ù³Ù²¹³Ü±ô»å has significantly expanded its offering of ³¦´Ç²Ô³Ù±ð³¾±è´Ç°ù²¹°ù²âÌýart, including major exhibitions by Peter Doig and Claudette Johnson, and a major commission by Cecily Brown. The first European solo exhibition of acclaimed New York painter Salman Toor will open on 2 October 2026.ÌýIn January,Ìýthe Courtauld also announced it will be creating two new galleries dedicated to contemporary art, set to open in 2029 as part of the development of its new world-class campus at Somerset HouseÌý
Courtauld Commission 2026: Ella Walker is free to visit. No ticket required.
