Corban Walker

Corban Walker was born in Dublin in 1967 and lives and works in New York.  

Corban Walker creates sculptures that engage with architecture and space, often on a large scale, using industrial materials such as steel, aluminum, and glass. He has a distinctive relationship to space that is central to his practice. Informed by Minimalism and architectural approaches, his work explores how we perceive, move through, and inhabit our surroundings. Through restrained interventions, he shifts proportions, balances, and scales, involving the viewer in a heightened awareness of their environment. Repetition, transparency, and the grid are recurring elements in his sculptures. 

At Atelier Calder, Walker brought together several works under the title Short Minute Matter (2015). The central work took the form of a labyrinthine pathway that divided the studio space. Using subtle guiding elements, Walker directed the movement of visitors, who had to discover and navigate an almost invisible route to experience the installation. The other works extended his exploration of architecture and scale through the motif of the cube, rendered in different materials. A metal structure made of small cubes evoked both an urban building and an architectural model; depending on the viewer’s position, the transparency of the forms revealed or concealed their underlying structure. An aluminum sculpture based on a nested structure developed a more complex geometry, with rivets, folds, and cuts emphasizing the precision of its construction and its shifting scales.