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Walton Ford

  • Biography
  • Works
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  • Museum & Offsite
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  • Biography
    View works. Walton Ford, Luctus, 2024
    Luctus, 2024
    View works
    Born in Westchester County, New York, 1960
    Lives & Works in Manhattan, New York
    Download Selected Press (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
    Download Artist's CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
  • "No one else, to my knowledge, has ever done watercolors of this size and ambition... and no contemporary artist has employed natural history to tell the kind of stories that Ford tells."
    —Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker
  • Walton Ford’s monumental watercolor paintings and editioned prints expand upon the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history...
    Photo by Paul Kasmin

    Walton Ford’s monumental watercolor paintings and editioned prints expand upon the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting, mediating on the often violent and bizarre moments that lie at the intersection of human culture and the natural world. Drawing from an extensive research practice that references scientific illustrations, field studies, fables, and myths, he develops stories about animals as they exist in the human imagination. Although human figures rarely appear in his paintings, their presence and effect is always implied.

    Ford graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1982. Though he initially intended to be a filmmaker, he quickly returned to painting as his focal point. On a formative trip to India in the early 1990s, he began painting indigenous birds while thinking about the effects of colonialism on the natural world. The resulting project fused wildlife and allegory, which would become the touchstone of his work.

  • Ford’s mid-career survey, Tigers of Wrath, opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2006, and traveled to the...

    Installation view of "Walton Ford,” Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France

    Ford’s mid-career survey, Tigers of Wrath, opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2006, and traveled to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas through 2008. The exhibition included over fifty watercolors drawing from a wide range of sources, including writings by the painter and naturalist John James Audubon. Ford’s first institutional exhibition in Europe opened at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart in 2010, and traveled to the Albertina in Vienna and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, through 2011. In 2015-16, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris staged an exhibition of works by Ford, highlighting a series inspired by the Beast of Gévaudan—a wolflike creature who, according to legend, attacked rural villagers in eighteenth-century France. In 2024, Ford unveiled a major site-specific exhibition of new paintings conceived in response to the collection of the historic Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, Italy, which opened during the 60th Venice Biennale. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York concurrently mounted a solo exhibition of Ford’s studies and sketches, displayed alongside drawings from The Morgan’s renowned permanent collection.

    In 2007, Taschen published the most comprehensive survey of Ford’s oeuvre to date, Pancha Tantra, titled after the ancient Indian collection of animal fables; the revised, fifth edition was released in 2024. Ford’s work is included in a number of private and public collections, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

  • Works
    Walton Ford, Rhyndacus, 2014

    Walton Ford

    Rhyndacus, 2014
    watercolor, gouache and ink on paper
    119 1/4 x 60 1/4 inches
    302.9 x 153 cm
  • Exhibitions
    • Walton Ford: 25 Years of Printmaking

      Walton Ford: 25 Years of Printmaking

      Online June 28 – August 11, 2023
      To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Walton Ford's first editioned print, Swadeshi-cide (1998), Kasmin is releasing rarely-available copies of the original Limited Art Editions of Pancha Tantra, published by Taschen. This release is contextualized by an online exhibition of a selection of the artist's print works. Spanning the years 1998-2020, the presentation demonstrates Ford's impressive command of the historic technique of intaglio etching and recognizes the invaluable partnership of Peter and James Pettengill's Wingate Studio, where Ford produced each of the works.
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    • Walton Ford: Barbary

      Walton Ford: Barbary

      October 10 – December 22, 2018 509 West 27th Street, New York
      Kasmin is pleased to present Barbary, a new body of large-scale watercolors by Walton Ford that will inaugurate the gallery’s flagship space in Chelsea, New York.
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    • Walton Ford: Watercolors

      Walton Ford: Watercolors

      May 1 – June 21, 2014
      Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce Watercolors, an exhibition of new paintings by Walton Ford on view May 1 - June 21, 2014 at 293 Tenth Avenue, New York. Ford continues to explore the visual and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting with his monumental watercolors, chronicling encounters between human culture and the natural world. Several pieces in this exhibition will expand upon Ford's longstanding practice of incorporating written marginalia in his work, and feature for the first time musings penned by the artist from the perspective of his animal subjects.
      View More
    • Walton Ford: I Don't Like To Look At Him, Jack. It Makes Me Think Of That Awful Day On The Island

      Walton Ford: I Don't Like To Look At Him, Jack. It Makes Me Think Of That Awful Day On The Island

      November 3 – December 23, 2011 293 Tenth Avenue, New York
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    • Walton Ford: Bestiarium

      Walton Ford: Bestiarium

      At The Hamburger Bahnof in Berlin January 23 – May 24, 2010
      View More
    • Walton Ford: New Work

      Walton Ford: New Work

      November 12 – December 23, 2009 293 Tenth Avenue, New York
      View More
    • Walton Ford

      Walton Ford

      May 8 – July 3, 2008 293 Tenth Avenue, New York
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  • Museum & Offsite

    • Walton Ford: Lion of God
      Exhibitions

      Walton Ford: Lion of God

      April 17 – September 22, 2024
      This year in Venice, Walton Ford will unveil a major site-specific exhibition featuring a new body of work conceived in response to the collection of the city’s historical institution Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. Lion of God will be Ford’s first solo exhibition in Italy, consisting of a series of monumental watercolor paintings that explore the historical, biological, and environmental resonance of the subjects of the library’s collection, particularly the figure of the lion in Tintoretto’s Apparizione della Vergine a San Girolamo (The Apparition of the Virgin to St. Jerome) (c. 1580).
    • Walton Ford: Birds and Beasts of the Studio, at The Morgan Library
      Exhibitions

      Walton Ford: Birds and Beasts of the Studio

      at The Morgan Library April 12 – October 20, 2024
  • News
    • Walton Ford

      Walton Ford

      Fourth Edition Of Pancha Tantra July 23, 2020 View More
    • Walton Ford interviewed in Apollo Magazine

      Walton Ford interviewed in Apollo Magazine

      by Thomas Marks October 24, 2018
      The American artist is well known for his large-scale watercolours of birds and beasts. His current exhibition at Kasmin Gallery, New York, reimagines the life...
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    • Walton Ford featured in The New York Times

      Walton Ford featured in The New York Times

      by Matthew Rose September 21, 2015 View More
    • Walton Ford interviewed in Wall Street Journal

      Walton Ford interviewed in Wall Street Journal

      By Claire Howorth April 30, 2014
      The 54-year-old artist has become famous for monumental wildlife pieces that bring a primal kingdom indoors. As he embarks on the next chapter of his...
      View More
    • Walton Ford featured in The New Yorker

      Walton Ford featured in The New Yorker

      by Calvin Tomkins January 18, 2009
      The Tasmanian wolf, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was neither a wolf nor a tiger. It was a thylacine, a marsupial cousin to kangaroos...
      View More
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