KARA WALKER: DISPATCHES FROM A-AND THE MUSEUM OF HALF-REMEMBERED HISTORIES
SPRÜTH MAGERS is pleased to announce Kara Elizabeth Walker presents Dispatches from A-and the Museum of Half-remembered Histories.
November 14, 2025 - April 4, 2026
Kara Walker's œuvre scrutinises themes of race, gender, sexuality and violence, showcasing a profound exploration of societal complexities and positioning her as a preeminent figure among contemporary American artists. At Sprüth Magers, Berlin, Walker debuts all-new cutout collages in vibrant ink and watercolour. Presented on a grand scale akin to history paintings, these works build upon her iconic monochromatic silhouettes by harnessing the power of formal composition, texture and colour. The show is completed by new pastels that reimagine traditional genres and several arresting watercolour drawings.
For her new body of work, Walker takes inspiration from an 1870s illustrated Popular History of the United States to explore how the emergence of history is negotiated -one that continues to undergird the fraught realities of the artist's home country. By examining this post-Civil War source, she interrogates the very mechanisms through which American identity has been constructed and mythologised.
She employs colourful cut-paper silhouettes, skilfully blending loose, expressive washes of colour with sharply delineated forms to craft scenes that depict America's violent historic and recent past, prompting critical reflection on their impact on contemporary realities.
In artworks such as Tituba's Handmaidens (2025), she commandeers historic imagery and art history - drawing on references from the Salem witch trials as well as works by John Singer Sargent and Diego Velázquez - and transforms these elements into incisive commentary that critiques prevailing narratives born from a pivotal moment when the nation's foundational contradictions between freedom and oppression were actively being rewritten and whitewashed for popular consumption.
In Liberation (after Ben Shahn) (2025), one of the large-scale collages on display, Walker reinterprets Ben Shahn's 1945 scene of children playing among war rubble. While Shahn's image balances despair with hope through the resilience of childhood play, Walker's iteration strips away any semblance of innocence. In place of swinging children, she substitutes lifeless figures hanging from poles like flags in the wind. stark imagery that symbolises the lives claimed in the name of war while also evoking the brutal public lynchings used to terrorise and control Black people, particularly in the South. In the foreground, a child plays hoop and stick, oblivious to the horror. Walker's version is exponentially darker than Shahn's, revealing how trauma becomes
an inescapable backdrop to childhood, and suggesting that violence becomes
normalised and passed down as inherited wounds to successive generations.