Photographer and artist Matthew Rolston, in partnership with Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, ArtCenter College of Design, Daido Moriyama Museum / Daido Star Space, and Leica Gallery, Los Angeles, present a multi-venue Los Angeles exhibition of his latest series Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, alongside the release of a special limited-edition monograph on Nazraeli Press.
In production for well over a decade, Vanitas represents a cumulative effort by Rolston to aesthetically capture the fraught human relationship to death through the medium of photography, a profound narrative, as seen through the decaying faces of mummified individuals in Palermo, Sicily’s Catacombe dei Cappuccini. These vivid, painterly compositions bring forth an interwoven meditation on beauty, mortality and art through Rolston’s uniquely photographic lens.
The monumentally scaled, richly hued Vanitas prints will be framed in patinated gold leaf, in a manner suggestive of and in tribute to the works of Francis Bacon, and, in a significant departure from typical edition practice, they will be offered as unique objects, more in the tradition of painting than photography.
Four individual works will be on view in a solo exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will display the most extensive presentation of the Vanitas series, including the monograph’s cover photograph.
