Kara Walker – The Bush. Skinny. De-boning

Kara Walker’s The Bush. Skinny. De-boning (Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin Edition No. 19) from 2002 is a complete set of three free-standing, laser-cut stainless steel sculptures painted black. Translating her signature cut-paper silhouette language into intimate sculptural form, Walker stages three stark vignettes that evoke the daily violence and psychological terror of the antebellum South.

Across the trio, flattened black figures interact with tools and domestic objects that double as instruments of harm: a hoe raised in self-directed aggression, a spoon-like implement forced upon a kneeling child, a knife poised beside a severed head. As in Walker’s monumental wall installations, menace resides in suggestion rather than explicit detail. A hooded figure recalls the iconography of racial terror, while the combination of bodies and agricultural implements underscores how labor, punishment, and sexual exploitation were structurally intertwined within slavery’s regime.

Beyond representing violence imposed by white enslavers, the limited edition artwork has been interpreted as confronting how slavery’s brutality reverberates within Black communities themselves. The scenes imply cycles of inherited trauma, where domination, humiliation, and coercion become internalized and tragically reproduced across generations. In this way, Walker presents slavery not as a closed historical chapter but as a psychic legacy embedded in memory, family structures, and cultural narratives.

The contemporary art edition was produced in 2002 in a limited edition of 100. Each set is hand-signed and numbered in black ink on the label affixed to the cover of the original presentation box.

“Kara Walker’s unwieldy imagination is fixated with race in the starkest and most American of terms, black and white, as they were forged in the ante-bellum South, a time not so long ago in a galaxy called here.” – Hamza Walker, Parkett No. 59, 2000