An Orbed Drop of Light

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present _An Orbed Drop of Light_, an exhibition of works by **Walton** **Ford**. This is the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in the London space. For the exhibition, Ford presents a selection of paintings and accompanying studies which extend his career-long investigation into the relationship between humans, animals and the natural world. Several works form part of the artist's new series of cinematic depictions of wolves, which explores the beauty, surrender and love that can be revealed in times of peril. 'The viewer is unarmed in these watercolours,' Ford reflects, 'a witness of sublimity and silence.' Looming large over the viewer, the wolves are framed by dramatic, expansive skies inspired by the cloud architecture of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's (1696–1770) ceiling frescoes. Ford notes: 'I wanted to see if I could create the sensation of looking up, past the wolves and into the heavens.' As is typical of Ford's oeuvre, many of the paintings incorporate literary allusions to writers and poets. Lending the exhibition its title, _An Orbed Drop of Light_, 2026, quotes John Keats' (1795–1821) tender description of love in the epic poem, _Endymion,_ whilst the endlessly unfolding sky in _Outward and outward and forever outward_, 2026, draws on a line from Walt Whitman's (1819–1892) evocative magnum opus, _Leaves of Grass_, 1855. In _Everliving Fire_, 2026, Ford conjures Heraclitus' (c. 535–475 BCE) metaphor of a perpetually surging and subsiding cosmos. Through attentiveness to minute, fleeting conditions of light and weather, or the intricacies of animal anatomy, Ford evokes the vastness of the natural world. Elsewhere, Ford places beauty in dialogue with fraught legacies of human and animal encounters. In _Taughannock_, 2026, a monumental passenger pigeon presides over a phantasmagoric tableau. This now-extinct species of wild, migrating pigeon once dominated the North American skies, their flocks numbering billions and taking several days to pass overhead, blotting out the sun and darkening the sky. Devastated by human deforestation and hunted unrestrainedly, the dove-like species declined rapidly and by the start of the twentieth century had vanished entirely. In _Hudson River Reel_, 2025, a bald eagle, a wild turkey and a turkey vulture perform a treetop 'reel'. Wings outstretched, the three birds perch high above the Hudson River while the golden, rolling landscape evokes the Hudson River School painters. Ford playfully alludes to Benjamin Franklin's proposal of the turkey as a more worthy national emblem than the bald eagle, stating 'We have a raptor, a scavenger, and a game bird. You can't have one bird; the eagle isn't going to tell the whole story'.