Self-Portrait as Christ on the Cross

Originally from the Caribbean, Frank Walter travelled to Europe in 1953, where he experienced discrimination and racism. His skin colour (“I was darkened by the sun during industrial progress”, he wrote) and his roots became an obsession that he channelled into paintings that he made on found media and sculpture. His hundreds of small, often-damaged paintings often reveal a complex world that merges fiction with autobiographical reality. 

Walter’s identity shifts, for example when he imagines himself as a black Christ in Self-Portrait as Christ on the Cross. Through his paintings, especially his imaginary self-portraits, Frank Walter travelled through time to ward off fate, escaping into a fantastical epic where skin colour is both a condemnation and an escape.