An Orbed Drop of Light", by Walton Ford at Galerie Max Hetzler

Monumental wolves framed by dramatic skies inspired by the frescoes of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo set the tone for Walton Ford's new series in this third solo exhibition by the artist at Galerie Max Hetzler — the first at the London location. The watercolors investigate beauty, surrender, and love in moments of danger, leaving the viewer disarmed before the immensity of the sky, which the artist sought to make appear to traverse the animals themselves towards infinity. As is characteristic of his work, the paintings carry literary allusions: the exhibition title comes from a verse in John Keats' poem "Endymion," about the delicacy of love, while "Outward and outward and forever outward" (2026) revisits a line from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," and "Everliving Fire" (2026) evokes Heraclitus' metaphor of a cosmos in constant flux. In "Taughannock" (2026), a monumental passenger pigeon presides over an almost ghostly scene — a species that once darkened the North American sky with flocks of billions of individuals and was driven to extinction by deforestation and predatory hunting in the early 20th century.