WALTON FORD: TUTTO

Gagosian is pleased to announce Tutto, an exhibition of new paintings by Walton Ford.

March 6 – April 19, 2025

Ford’s practice centers on how animals are represented and the intersections of animal and human lives. Tutto is his first body of work to focus on a single individual: the eccentric Milanese heiress Luisa Casati (1881–1957). Depicting the exotic animals that she kept, Ford portrays her years in Venice shortly before World War I.

Known as La Marchesa, Casati was one of Europe’s wealthiest women and is legendary for her extravagant pursuit of aesthetic extremes and social recognition. Startled onlookers describe how she wore snakes as necklaces, walked with a pair of cheetahs in Venice’s piazzas, and attended an opera clad in a headdress of peacock feathers that were stained with the blood of a freshly killed chicken.

Declaring her desire to be “a living work of art,” Casati commissioned elaborate dresses from leading costumiers of the era including Paul Poiret and Léon Bakst, designer for the Ballets Russes. Obsessed with immortalizing her image, she was the subject of portraits by artists such as Giovanni Boldini, Romaine Brooks, Adolf de Meyer, Augustus John, Man Ray, and Kees van Dongen, and a patron of projects by the Futurists. In 1910, Casati leased the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on Venice’s Grand Canal, an eighteenth-century structure that would later be occupied by Peggy Guggenheim, and which today houses Guggenheim’s collection. Casati transformed its rooms and gardens into a lavish setting for her theatrically bohemian soirées.

The writer would have a second career as an Italian nationalist during and after the war, devising a theatrical politics that presaged Italian fascism. Taking on substantial debts, Casati would by the 1930s lose her fortune and her menagerie of animals, going on to a relatively meager life in London.