Women in Verdaccio Green: Ella Walker sets the stage at the Courtauld Gallery
Isabella Jones Bartle
Portrait of Ella Walker © Jon C Archdeacon.jpg
On the morning of 3 September 2026, Elena Crippa, the Courtauld Gallery’s senior curator of contemporary art, welcomed the press to the unveiling of Ella Walker’s commission for the Courtauld Gallery. The intimate unveiling allowed viewers to peruse Verdaccio Wall and The Studio across the John Browne Entrance Hall and Ticketing Hall, hung between two windows overlooking the gleaming Somerset House Courtyard and above the curving staircase leading down to the vault. Walker’s two site-specific paintings form the second in a series of annual commissions by contemporary artists for the Courtauld Gallery, launched in 2025 with works by Rachel Jones. Signalling the anticipated start of the autumn art season, Walker’s theatrical colours, minuscule details and bizarre, somewhat unearthly figures put on a monumental, silent performance.
Her contradictory marriage of material and subject causes the viewer to reconsider what makes an artwork ‘historical’ or ‘contemporary,’ beyond its date of creation.
Ella Walker graduated with a BA in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art in 2015 before attending The Royal Drawing School’s Drawing Year. Walker’s large-scale artworks draw heavily on the Gothic and Renaissance worlds, two art historical periods for which the Courtauld Gallery holds extensive collections. Walker has displayed her works in a series of solo and group exhibitions, with some reaching the walls of Le Château Aubenas, Frieze London, and Christie’s, making the 2026 Courtauld Commission her latest major project in London.
Revitalising the ancient fresco painting tradition and drawing from cinema, fashion and theatre, Walker conjures eerie and uncanny scenes where women gather in enigmatic circumstances.
Ella Walker (b. 1993), Verdaccio Wall, 2026. Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk and pencil on linen,
Walker’s Verdaccio Wall depicts a crowded scene of female figures, organised amongst a stepladder and a high wall, standing, watching, speaking, and laughing. The verdaccio green, a hue common in 15th-century Italian underpainting, and visible brushstrokes evoke a raw and vulnerable quality, as if we are witnessing the painting unfinished or half-dressed. The women, who bare their teeth, raise their arms and play before the viewer, explicitly defy the composed behaviour of women in historical representations. Walker’s muddy and varied application of colour on the ground suggests a disruption, perhaps in the execution of the fresco-like technique or to the new, ambiguous female representation on the canvas.
The verdaccio green and visible brushstrokes evoke a raw and vulnerable quality, as if we are witnessing the painting unfinished or half-dressed.
Ella Walker (b. 1993), The Studio, 2026. Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk and pencil on linen, on
In The Studio, Walker presents the artist’s studio as a mystical, surreal, and dreamlike environment, where people, materials, and remembered images mesh together. Walker’s use of perspective reminds me of Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ, a painting which uses columns and doorways to create a striking sense of distance. Sandro Botticelli’s The Trinity with Saints Mary Magdalen and John the Baptist, located on the second floor of The Courtauld Gallery, fascinated Walker for its dramatic contrasts in scale between figures. Throughout the composition, Walker worked with found imagery and memory, including a breastfeeding mother from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Oedipus Rex(1967), a Polaroid photograph by the architect Carlo Mollino, and the depiction within Botticelli’s The Trinity with Saints Mary Magdalen and John the Baptist of the Archangel Raphael and the young Tobias, who carries a fish harbouring supernatural power. Inspired by Botticelli’s prolific workshop, Walker considers the overlooked role of women in the studio as inspiration, creators, and collaborators.
Mysterious, monumental, and visually inviting, Walker uses natural pigments, chalk, and pencil to display textural layers like the hidden layers of a painting undergoing conservation. Signs of pentimenti - pencil outlines, written notes, painted shadows, broad brush marks and coats of verdaccio - draw the viewer in to explore hidden clues within the painting. The conservation process of viewing an artwork under infrared, ultraviolet, and X-ray light brings us closer to the period's techniques and the personal decisions of the artwork’s creator. Walker brings every artistic decision to the foreground, exposing every layer of the artistic process, and thus, accentuating the essential relationship between creator and observer, hider and seeker.
Within the Courtauld Gallery, where historical artworks and contemporary commissions increasingly share the same institutional space, Verdaccio Wall and The Studio operate as both ideological and material bridges between historical and contemporary ways of making. As Walker constructs Renaissance-inspired interior spaces and reinterprets 15th-century pigment and underdrawing practices, her contradictory marriage of material and subject causes the viewer to reconsider what makes an artwork ‘historical’ or ‘contemporary,’ beyond its date of creation. Walker’s striking women, painted in verdaccio green and situated within mystifying surroundings, highlight human interaction and ways of thinking which transcend time periods.
With the Courtauld Gallery’s two new galleries dedicated to contemporary art due to open in 2029, Walker’s commission arrives at a pivotal moment in the Gallery’s expanding engagement with contemporary art. Verdaccio Wall and The Studio offer an early glimpse of what this evolving presence might look like, setting the stage for the expanded contemporary programme to come.
Courtauld Commission 2026: Ella Walker is now on display until 1 September 2027 in the John Browne Entrance Hall and Ticketing Hall.
