Kara Walker

A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be

19 February 2022 - 24 July 2022
work in collection

In the exhibition A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be, Kara Walker (1969, USA) opens her private archives containing more than 600 drawings that she has carefully kept hidden from the outside world for the past twenty-eight years. De Pont is presenting these unknown treasures, along with brand new works and a series of animation films, in Walker's first major solo exhibition in the Netherlands.
Walker, who initially caused a sensation with large-scale silhouette cut-outs, is one of the best-known American artists at the moment. In provocative and obscene, but aesthetically pleasing works on paper executed with extraordinary technical finesse, she portrays racism, gender, sexuality and violence. For Walker, drawing and the written word are the perfect vehicles for satire and caricature, for pamphletism and subversion and for the movement of the imagination. With subjects ranging from the American history of enslavement to the presidency of Barack Obama, she challenges the viewer to question established views and deeply ingrained myths. Fearless in her analyses, she investigates the origins of collective self images as well as her own identity.

The exhibition has been organized by Kunstmuseum Basel, in collaboration with Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and De Pont Museum in Tilburg.

_{Accompanying the exhibition is the richly illustrated catalogue Kara Walker – A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be: Drawings 1992–2020, which contains texts by Kara Walker, Anita Haldeman, Maurice Berger, Aria Dean and an introduction by Josef Helfenstein, Philipp Demandt and Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen. Published by JRP|Editions, Geneva, 598 pp., ISBN 978-3-03764-557-4, € 60,00.}