Frank Walter: The Philosophy of Color is the first museum exhibition of Frank Walter’s work (1926–2009) in Brazil. Opening on September 3 at MAC_BAHIA – Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Bahia, in Salvador, the exhibition is curated by Daniel Rangel and Barbara Paca.

The choice of Salvador to host the show relates to the prominent role of African culture and the African diaspora in the formation of Bahia’s capital, as well as to its landscape, which resonates with the spaces observed and imagined throughout the artist’s work. The exhibition brings together a broad selection of works, encompassing different paths developed by Walter throughout his practice: landscapes, which reveal his close attention to the natural world; figurative works featuring fantastic beings, self-portraits, scenes of Caribbean social life, representations of different indigenous peoples that inhabited the region, such as the Arawak and Carib, as well as mythological scenes and abstract geometric paintings that articulate a deeply particular cosmology. Together, these works reveal the voracious manner in which Walter absorbed his surroundings, connecting people and places through history, as though traveling through time.

The exhibition’s title [Philosophy of Color] refers to the central role that color played in Walter’s practice, both as a formal element and as a means of apprehending and organizing the world. The artist sought to register the particular chromatic qualities of the places through which he passed, attentive to the relationships between landscape, atmosphere, and experience. At the same time, he attributed to certain colors symbolic values connected to history, ancestry, and heraldry—the field concerned with the study and representation of coats of arms, emblems of nobility, and their systems of colors and symbols. Walter frequently worked with whatever materials were at hand, painting on photographs, film packaging, wooden boards, and other everyday supports. His choice of materials establishes a particular relationship between the scale and scope of his production: a visionary breadth is articulated through diminutive, fragile, or commonplace supports, transformed by the artist into surfaces for the construction of vast worlds.

Born in Antigua in 1926, Frank Walter was a painter, writer, poet, photographer, and investigator of subjects spanning history, science, and philosophy. Considered one of the first modern painters of the Caribbean, he developed an extensive body of work over the course of his life, comprising approximately 7,000 works of art and an archive of around 50,000 pages. His practice is deeply connected to his family histories, questions of race and ancestry, the history of Antigua, and the African diaspora, bringing together Caribbean, African, and European references. His writings, autobiographies, and paintings constitute a singular universe in which memory, genealogy, nature, imagination, and speculation converge.