Frank Walter: Moon Voyage

David Zwirner is pleased to present Moon Voyage, an exhibition of work by Antiguan artist, writer, and polymath Frank Walter (1926–2009) at the gallery’s Paris location. Organized in close collaboration with art historian Barbara Paca and the Walter family, this is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and the first dedicated presentation of his work in Paris.

Featuring paintings, works on paper, and a selection of ephemera related to the myriad manifestations of Walter’s intellectual and artistic lives, Moon Voyage will showcase the development of the artist’s work as he shifted from the landscape genre to abstraction and back again, returning to certain vistas or motifs as a way of working through various ideas and compositional strategies. The works in this presentation speak to Walter’s romanticism; his individualistic, vividly colored, and intimately scaled compositions fuse abstract forms with scientific and celestial concepts or allusions to the wonders of the natural world. The exhibition takes its title from that of a painting from the Milky Way Galaxy series, a body of work that expresses Walter’s interest in outer space, extraterrestrial life, and the mysteries of the universe, and which forms one of several focuses of this show. Moon Voyage highlights the artist’s keen sense of observation and his vivid imagination, as he depicted with fascination scenes and figures both real and envisioned that span time, space, and the physical and spiritual worlds.

This presentation will coincide with the inclusion of Walter’s work in the 2025 exhibition Après la fin. Cartes pour un autre avenir at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, and follows the artist’s recent institutional solo shows at The Drawing Center, New York (2024), and the Garden Museum, London (2023). His work was recently included in group exhibitions at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris (2024), and the Fondation Carmignac, Hyères, France (2023).