In his 2025 new work series, Liam Walker peers through the fragile lens of memory, routine, and quiet rupture to reveal the emotional undercurrents of everyday life. With a painter’s eye and a poet’s restraint, he captures moments where joy, dread, love, and alienation quietly coexist. Each canvas is a fragment of lived experience—intimate yet archetypal—inviting us into the psychological texture of time passing.
‘FIG’
Liam Walker Solo Show 2025
Curated by Yiran Zhu / Presented by WARMBATH.ART
16-22 December 2025, 103 Kingsway, Covent Garden, London WC2B 6QX
‘Fig’ is artist Liam Walker’s third solo show. The first, ‘A Pocketful of Bitter’, a mixed media presentation of drawings and paintings, was held in London in 2022 and marked the point at which the artist’s practice was transitioning from pencil to paint. A second show, ‘Oversized Suit’, held in Mayfair in late 2024, featured only works in paint and sold out. One year on, Liam’s third show, this time in Covent Garden, brings together a collection of brand-new paintings completed over the last twelve months, which range in size from 35 by 20.5cm (‘Phantom Botanics’) to the largest (‘English Wedding in late Summer’) at 117 by 75cm.
The new works present distilled moments with real, imaginary or surreal narratives. The paintings are often concerned with ritual – love, marriage, church, funerals – or else with the artist’s state of mind in the face of social pressures and anxieties, from the claustrophobia of domesticity to the stress of becoming a home-owner. Rituals are seen as marking the passage of time, a theme which the artist is particularly aware of and sensitive to.
Liam Walker was born in 1991 and brought up in Bradford, West Yorkshire. He took a BA in Art and Drawing at Edinburgh School of Art, followed by a Masters at The Royal Drawing School in Edinburgh. His practice sees him working at his desk, unfurling a large roll of gesso primed canvas as he begins, so that each artwork can be any size it organically evolves into to fit the subject. This unusual methodology shows how closely Liam’s smooth-surface paintings in acrylics still derive very directly from the precise draughtsmanship that characterises his earlier works in pencil.
The artist’s Northern roots, together with his Catholic upbringing and Irish Catholic maternal line, remain tangible in the worldview he portrays. As well as being deeply personal and concerned with the artist’s thoughts, feelings and contemporary social investigations, the artworks carry with them a mordant sense of humour - sometimes light and sharp; sometimes gloomy and morose - that represents both an Irish and a Northern English sensibility. The works also speak the language of Northern working class culture in the second half of the twentieth century, especially of works in other media by writers and directors such as Alan Bennett and Alan Sillitoe. It’s possible to see in Liam’s work the traces of inspiration from the great British artists of that same era too, particularly David Hockney and Peter Blake.
From silent screams to feelings of alienation and rebellion, the new artworks talk of desolation and private intensity but are always characterised by biting wit and a framework of social commentary firmly belonging to the now. They remind us that whilst life might provide the primary spark of inspiration, the creative process moves the works on from anything literal or didactic towards the vivid storytelling Liam’s paintings express, capturing not only the artist’s singular perspective, but a series of highly-recognisable takes on life that strike a clear chord with viewers and admirers of his work.
About Liam Walker
Liam Walker was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. He graduated with a BA Hons in Painting & Drawing from Edinburgh College of Art in 2012. On graduating, Walker’s work was included in the New Contemporaries exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy. He graduated from The Royal Drawing School in 2016. Much of his works are autobiographical: narratives dealing with relationship, love, family, memories and concerns. His drawn scenes flit from past to present and back again; a past the artist remembers, a past he never knew and a past imagined. Walker’s works have been collected by and exhibited in Lancashire Museum of Art, The Royal Collection, and Special Exhibition in honour of the Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla, Christie’s London.
Fig is among the earliest crops to be domesticated by humankind, dating back to 9400–9200 BCE. Naturally, it has been attached to great cultural significance. In Christianity in particular, the fig carries layered meanings—signalling the tension between knowledge and innocence, moral failure and the possibility of renewal. It is a fruit of contradictions: tender yet resilient, ancient yet continually reinterpreted. It marks both rupture and return, a quiet emblem of the complicated human condition.
Liam Walker’s most recent paintings certainly resemble a similar complexity.
Following his previous London exhibition Oversized Suit, which unfolded like an autobiographical album, Walker continues to pay attention on the narrative aspect of his painting. Perhaps thanks to his early practice in drawing, he relies on distinct, sharply defined lines and clear figurations. His imagery is sourced primarily from his own memories—some of which had lingered for years before eventually finding their way onto the canvas. Yet these works are less recollections than reconstructions. Through a sensitive and fragile lens, he re-examines fragments of his lived experience and reframes them in relation to broader societal landscapes. Memory becomes a material he reshapes, testing its boundaries, questioning its reliability, and allowing its distortions to surface.
Walker is incredibly skillful in capturing “the moment.” But “the moment” here is not necessarily rooted in authentic reality. Instead, his works often feel “staged,” not in a theatrical or extravagant sense, but in the quiet deliberateness of arrangement. Every element is charged with intention. A gesture, a gaze, the drift of smoke, the slight tilt of a figure—such details crystallise an environment that is both immediate and strangely distant. Many of his compositions seem to overlay multiple timelines or perspectives, condensing them into a singular, uncanny surface. As a result, the images twist and distort gently away from realism, drifting towards a surreal, dreamlike territory.
Walker draws from his interests in tragic comedies, where humour is never far from misfortune and absurdity only illuminates deeper truths. This tonal ambiguity remains central to his practice: joy, dread, love, confusion, and alienation coexist in a fragile equilibrium. Even at their most humorous, the paintings carry an undercurrent of unease; even at their bleakest, a flicker of tenderness persists.
Over the years, Walker’s palette has become more pastel-like, yet the coldness and melancholy elements in his work have not receded. Instead, the hues seem to enhance the sense of bitterness, which has only been masked by a sugar coating. The softness of colour counterbalances the sharpness of line, creating a visual language that is at once gentle and unsettling. In these new paintings, this tension becomes even more pronounced—revealing an artist increasingly interested in the slippages between reality and imagination, sincerity and irony, vulnerability and performance.
Through this exhibition, Walker invites us into a soft internal space, where memory bends, humour flickers, and the small oddities of daily life reveal the fragility we carry within us—where the unsettled finds its own quiet coherence.
- Yiran Zhu