Walton Ford

Walton Ford

Walton Ford - Galerie Max Hetzler

Walton Ford is known for his monumental and extremely detailed watercolours depicting wild animals. Fuelled by his fascination with their relationship to man, Ford’s work elaborates on the tradition of natural history painting, whilst infusing it with historical facts and surreal imaginings. The artist interprets and transforms stories and images, drawing from history, literature, underground comic books, legends, myths, popular films, as well as visits to natural history museums, among other sources. Ford says he seeks “all these different ways people are put in contact with wild animals they don’t fully understand”.

“Ford’s creatures have neither the expressions nor the postures found in the old treatises of natural history. Never domesticated, but too intelligent to be only wild, these unclassifiable animals belong to a third genre. Which, in a way, is what Ford aspires to do: as a contemporary artist unlike others, going against the current of the conceptual doxa, developing a kind of “pulp art” which combines in novel ways classical references and the codes of mass culture.”

— Claude D’Anthenaise and Jérôme Neutres

Image: Spasmodic Affection, 2019, watercolour, gouache and ink on paper, 273.1 x 152.4 cm.; 107 1/2 x 60 in.

Selected Institutional Exhibitions

Walton Ford

Walton Ford

Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris

15 September 2015 – 28 February 2016
Walton Ford

Bestiarium

Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Berlin

23 January – 24 May 2010

Biography

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Selected Press

The Brooklyn Rail November 2017

The New Yorker January 2009

Artforum International January 1992