Walton Ford
Ausbruch, 2018
Watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper
© Walton Ford Photo by Tom Powel Imaging, Inc. Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery
Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Walton Ford, on view through April 23, 2022 and is his first exhibition with the gallery in New York.
Absorbing the techniques prevalent in scientific field studies, explorers’ notebooks, and lushly illustrated natural history books, Ford’s watercolors recast, reverse, and rearrange the conventions of wildlife art. His practice is research-driven, responding to such diverse inspirations as Hollywood horror movies, Indian fables, medieval bestiaries, colonial hunting narratives, and obscure zookeepers’ manuals. Ford’s visions are consistently of wild rather than domestic animals. His monumental paintings seek to show us what it means for such animals to live not so much in nature as in the human imagination.