- Meet
Agnes Walden
Agnes Walden talks to us about the quiet moments in loose brushstrokes, conveying a desire for honesty and familiarity between the artist and the subject.
The language of paint is a vocabulary of intimacy: touch, attention, accumulation, compromise, repair. I have faith in painting as a tool for naming the places where language and other structures fail.
About the Artist
Agnes Walden (b. 1994) is a Brooklyn, New York-based painter concerned with queer and trans subjectivities. Agnes paints in a restricted yet vibrant palette, allowing large swaths of jewel-toned paint to shine through layers of dark scumbling and shadowy glazing. Short staccato brushstrokes offer a visual articulation of the act of seeing, each mark evidence of attention and reverence. Her paintings are a record of mutual understanding between the artist and the sitter, a resonant moment of connection and acknowledgment experienced by two trans people. Through her intimate paintings, Agnes explores the limitations and potentialities of representation in portraiture.
Exhibited at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum faculty exhibit, 2021
The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant recipient, 2020
Solo exhibition, favors, at An Sylvia Exhibitions, 2020
