WALTON FORD: BARBARY
Paul Kasmin Gallery opens its flagship Chelsea, New York, location with an exhibition of works by Walton Ford.
While recent research may eventually prove otherwise, the last wild Barbary lion was killed in 1922 by a French colonial hunter in Morocco. The Barbary lion, however, is the most iconic of all the lion species and once roamed across all of Northern Africa, from Morocco to Egypt. It was the lion who battled at the Coliseum in Rome, the lion housed in the Tower of London, the lion painted by Delacroix, and even today the lion who roars for the Hollywood film studio MGM. Walton Ford has spent the last 18 years of his career researching the Barbary lion. His fascination with this particular lion is based on the history of its use as a symbol of power and strength since the beginning, even though it has been hunted into extinction. But, for Ford, the idea of the animal and its thousands of years long iconographic history is what intrigues him the most.
His most recent exhibition of large-scale watercolors depicting the Barbary lion will kick off the
Paul Kasmin Gallery’s brand-new flagship space in Chelsea, New York.
In an interview with the Brooklyn Rail from last year, Ford states, “So there were many MGM lions and I thought about the retired ones, the has-been ones…The other thing that was interesting about those lions is that they had the belly mane and they have the huge mane that’s characteristic of what they call a Barbary lion, which is the lion that the Romans used in the Coliseum. It’s very rare…the magnificent lion of all lions.”
It’s the vision of this lion, the perception of it as a symbolic idea of power, that has led to its extinction. Its desirability led to its end. As the gallery states, “The Barbary lion, depicted in art by the earliest civilizations, has come to represent nobility and power; perceptions that encourage a reverence and obsession that conversely endangered its survival.”
According to the gallery, “these meticulously rendered paintings depict moments inspired by real-life brutality, feverish imagination, and art historical myth. They conjure the violent and bizarre moments that lie on the intersection of human culture and the natural world. Ford’s monumental works, expanding upon the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting, rarely feature human figures, yet their presence and effect is always implied.”