In Multiplicity

Under The Mango Tree is humbled to present the works of artist Barbara Walker from 22. June–02. Aug. 2024. In times of widespread unbearable geopolitical turmoil, so-called culture-wars, and climate crisis, the general discourse has become so polarized that invaluable perspectives of hybridity are lost between extremes. The exhibition In Multiplicity is one that seeks to gently remind us of the importance to engage in the complexity of identity, and the need to accept it as an everyday norm, without hostility.

Born in 1954 to a Jamaican father and a German-Jewish mother, who, as a child, fled Germany with a Kindertransport at the beginning of 1939, Barbara has experienced a life filled with dualities. Her works embody this intersectionality, referencing not only her positionality but the lived experience of her ancestors, between class, race, gender and sexuality. As varied as she is, the exhibition will show the diversity of her artistic expression, exploring struggle, pain, beauty and the relation to Mother Earth through sculpture, painting, etching and pastels.

In Multiplicity greets the visitor with a masterful pastel, depicting Barbara’s grandmother caressed by the morning sunlight sitting on her porch in Woodside, Jamaica. The exhibition extends a personal invitation into the front room where sculptural expressions reflect the interconnectedness of the impacts of the slave trade and the Shoah on her identity, before relieving the observer with masterful pastels, and sculptures of seemingly anonymous female nudes. The artist remarks, that these works have always been created with the intention to represent the goddess Mother Earth (also known as Gaia, Pachamama, or Prithvi, in Greek, Andean, and Hindu Mythology) and her endurance through humankind’s struggle defined by seeing each other as different. But of course they also act as a reflection of the body and feminine identity.

In Multiplicity is a genealogical show, representing an artist who has lived between worlds literally and metaphorically. After being born in Guyana, growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Barbara Walker graduated with a degree in sculpture and painting from the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, in Switzerland in 1977. After a brief stay in Dijon, France, she moved to Cologne, West-Germany, where she lived until a few years after the reunification of Germany. As part of the artist’s collective “Galerie am Buttermarkt”, Cologne and as an independent artist she was part of group and solo exhibitions in Germany and London, UK, as well as San Francisco, USA between 1985 and 1993 after which she returned to Jamaica. Barbara Walker has been living in Berlin since 2019, where In Multiplicity is her first solo-show.