Walton Ford

New Museum, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in May 1995

“The big thing I’m always looking for in my work is a sort of attraction-repulsion, where the stuff is beautiful to begin with until you notice that some sort of horrible violence is about to happen or is in the middle of happening.” – Walton Ford

“Walton Ford paints pictures full of animals. He uses animals as metaphors, and works consciously with the way animals have been used symbolically throughout the history of western iconography. In short, we can say that Ford’s visual universe is preoccupied with animals, but it is really about humans. None of Ford’s pictures tells nice, affectionate ‘feel-good’ stories about how well and generously we treat one another. The stories in the pictures are about greed, the desire for power, rampant sexuality etc., things that of course are not necessarily evil in themselves, for nature is not evil; that is purely a human projection.” – Mette Marcus, Walton Ford (Humlebaek: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2010), p. 4.