Artist Ella Walker (b.1993, Manchester, UK) today unveils two new site-specific commissions for the Courtauld Gallery – the second in a series of annual commissions by contemporary artists to create new work for the gallery.
The new artworks are on display in The John Browne Entrance Hall and the Ticketing Hall and are free to visit.
Ella Walker creates monumental canvases that act like stages where bewitching figures gather. They combine observed settings and architectures with visual references spanning fine art, cinema, and fashion. They are dominated by figures whose gestures and interactions are both familiar and confounding, eschewing expected behaviour and transcending fixed roles. The new artworks continue the artist’s dialogue with traditional techniques and subjects from the Renaissance period, richly represented at the Courtauld Gallery.
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 the Courtauld 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.
Ella Walker said: “The Courtauld Commission is an opportunity to think deeply about the surface of my paintings, the method of applying pigment to an absorbent ground, a ground that is rich with marble and chalk, and is very absorbent and textured. I hope the colours will glow, have transparency and movement within the collection of particles.”
Walker lives and works in London. She studied Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art and The Royal Drawing School. Recent solo exhibitions include Idolâtrie, Le Château – Centre for Contemporary Art and Heritage of Aubenas, France (2025); The Romance of the Rose, Pilar Corrias, London (2024); After great pain, a formal feeling comes, Casey Kaplan, New York (2024); and Chorus, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2023).
This is the second in a series of annual commissions by contemporary artists to be displayed in The John Browne Entrance Hall and Ticketing Hall at the Courtauld Gallery. Since the transformation of its Gallery in 2021, the Courtauld has significantly expanded its offering of contemporary art, 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. In January, the 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 House
