Curator, Christian Rattemeyer: Kelley Walker in his triptych goes back to a press photograph of the Birmingham race riots. Here Kelley Walker not only responds to the famous image that Andy Warhol used for a portfolio of silk screens, but also carefully responds to the technique itself with which Warhol had appropriated that image from the popular press at the time.
Using the image as a digital print, and then silk screening individually two different kinds of chocolate, dark chocolate and white chocolate, to partially efface the image, Kelley Walker in effect separates the different layers of Warhol’s initial work: The appropriation of the image, the process of the silk screening and the subject matter, which is the confrontation of black and white, into three different material registers.