Bathhouse, Space K, Seoul

In her own series of bathhouse paintings, Caroline Walker engages both with the history of images that have snooped on (chiefly female) bathers, and with the continued foreignness, for those of us not habituated to the rituals of public bathing, of the spaces in which it takes place. In two of these works, Origin and Treatment Pool, versions of Félix Valotton's Le Bain Turc (1907) adorn the walls of bathhouse interiors concocted by the artist.  In both cases, Walker reverses  the Swiss painter's grouping of fulsome female nudes, wryly staking out her claim to approach her subject from an alternative perspective even while acknowledging the historical sway of such images.