Walton Ford

The smallest fragment of source material related to natural history can evoke sweeping cinematic images.
—Walton Ford

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Walton Ford. Opening on March 11, 2022, this 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.

Cabeza de Vaca (2021) takes its name from the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer. Shipwrecked on the Gulf Coast in 1528, he journeyed lost across the American Southwest before finally reaching Mexico City eight years later. The painting is an exploration of human fear and paranoia when faced with the unknown, the mountainous rattlesnake a dream symbol suggesting the misapprehension and trauma of first contact.