Matthew Rolston
Matthew Rolston
Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits
September 25 through November 8, 2025
Exhibition Reception: Thursday, September 25th
Photographer and artist Matthew Rolston, in partnership with ArtCenter College of Design, Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, Daido Moriyama Museum / Daido Star Space, and Leica Gallery, is pleased to announce 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. Timed to this milestone, Matthew Rolston will additionally be honored at this year’s ArtCenter Alumni Awards, receiving the College’s highest honor, its Lifetime Achievement Award, as a leading cultural and creative force, educator and mentor. Rolston is part of a distinguished group of ArtCenter alumni, including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Doug Aitken and Lee Friedlander, who have been previously honored with the College’s Lifetime Achievement Award for their contributions to the fields of fine art and photography.
Throughout his long career, Matthew Rolston has fundamentally questioned the truth of the camera lens, deploying it not so much as a documentarian’ s tool but rather an expansion of the human capacity for expression and perception. His earliest work was commissioned in 1977 by Andy Warhol for Warhol’s groundbreaking publication Interview while Rolston was still a student at ArtCenter. This work would begin a career that was celebrated in 2017 with a mid-career retrospective entitled Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles, comprised of portraits from the 1970s and 80s that reframed celebrities in the guise of classic Hollywood glamour portrait photography.
Shifting to more conceptual personal projects later in his career, such as the fine art series Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits and Art People: The Pageant Portraits, Rolston would continue to interrogate the thresholds between reality and artifice. In Vanitas, his photographic
inquiry contemplates a set of unanswerable questions about human existence on earth, actively putting himself and his lens in direct dialogue with death.
The last interment in Palermo’s catacombs was in 1939, nearly three and a half centuries after the first of the frati Cappuccini were laid to rest there. Over time, the catacombs became less a marker of piety and more a symbol of status; the city’s most distinguished families and individuals claimed it as their final resting place. Within these catacombs lie over 8,000 individuals in various states of decay, put there largely out of the belief that the crypt bestowed unique spiritual power to expedite one’s entry into heaven.
Following months of careful planning and preparation, Rolston shot the entirety of the Vanitas series over the course of one week in 2013, creating portraits of over 50 mummified remains. He intentionally approached the series well outside of photographic tradition, pivoting instead toward a painterly use of color through a proprietary technique utilizing three different wavelengths of light. This allowed him to achieve what he terms “expressionistic lighting”, giving these portraits a uniquely stylized beauty in marked and theatrical contrast with the disturbing choice of subject matter. The resulting images balance the decomposition of the figures with blue, ethereal lighting drawn from Marian symbolism in Catholic imagery, deftly teasing between the serene and the grotesque.
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 Bac on, and, in a significant departure from typical edition practice, they will be offered as unique objects, more in the tradition of
painting than photography.
At ArtCenter College of Design, Rolston will present a triptych of the Vanitas work as a wall-sized installation at the College’s South Campus, curated by Julie Joyce, Director, ArtCenter Galleries and Vice President, Exhibitions. This presentation will be the only triptych on exhibition; the central panel appears on the clamshell cover of the forthcoming Vanitas monograph, a signature of the series. These three works, hung in the Mullin Transportation Design Center, comprise two images of mummified children flanking one of an elderly adult, brought together in the style of an altarpiece, where the sacred and mundane, youth and elder age, collide. Four further 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.
A single work will be shown at a solo exhibition that will open with a private book launch and artist signing at Daido Star Space in downtown Los Angeles on September 30, 2025. Organized in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation in Tokyo, the presentation echoes the institution’s interest in cross-cultural approaches to photography. Leica Gallery, Los Angeles, will present another solo exhibition of an additional single work from Vanitas, accompanied by a public artist talk and book signing. At a venue rooted in the technical and material traditions of photography, this presentation will highlight the painterly, craft-driven aspects of Rolston’s Vanitas project.
Together, these four distinct presentations introduce Vanitas as a ‘mostra diffusa’, an exhibition intentionally distributed among multiple venues. This multi-venue presentation across Los Angeles reflects a conscious departure from the contemporary conventions of exhibition production, recalling art historical traditions in which singular works were presented in isolation.
These works, and the Palermo catacombs themselves, are densely referential. As the lore of the crypt grew, it attracted painters and photographers alike including Otto Dix, Peter Hujar, Sigmar Polke, Richard Avedon and many others. Dix’s 1924 watercolor series From the Catacombs in Palermo, which served as Rolston’s first exposure to the crypt, was made during a period of intense focus on loss and death in the wake of the First World War, while Hujar’s 1963 foray to the crypt, with painter Paul Thek, became integrated within a later body of work musing on his circle of friends set against this backdrop of death.
Rolston’s Vanitas draws from a wide range of art historical influences, including but not limited to the painterly traditions of 17th century Dutch ‘vanitas’ still-life painting, as well as the visceral figuration of Expressionists Egon Schiele and James Ensor, and the School of London painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. A particular influence is drawn from Avedon’s images of his father Jacob’s final days, showing not just his father’s compromised health, but how the idea of death itself is fundamentally rooted in the world and the minds of the living. Rolston follows in these precedents, and reconciles his own past within the greater lineage of photography, to portray essential truths that go far beyond the framed image.
As renowned American author and photography historian Philip Gefter writes in an essay that opens the Vanitas monograph, “Rolston’s Vanitas series – his photographs from the Capuchin Catacombs – is a confrontation with death as potent and mystifying as the truth itself can be when it is so unabashedly revealed. ‘Vanitas,’ the name derived from a genre of Dutch painting from the 17th century, is associated with memento mori still-lifes that symbolize the shortness and fragility of our time on earth. ‘Memento mori,’ a Latin term, is a reminder of our mortality that translates, ‘remember you must die.’ In the Vanitas series, the fragility of the mummies is a leitmotif throughout, their petrified skulls given a ghostly cast, their facial structures contorted into life-like expressions from the protracted violence of centuries-old decay, their skeletal limbs mangled from advanced stages of decomposition into gestures that appear almost animated, as if by the individuals who once inhabited these bodies, their corporeal remains the only residue of their existence.”
In Vanitas, Rolston gathers together these influences while also putting forward his own self reflection regarding his early career in Hollywood celebrity image making. Through his lens, Vanitas seeks to transcend the boundaries between the living and the dead, and to demonstrate
that the human experience exists in a long, borderless, fragile yet miraculous continuity. While he leaves open whether these mummies have indeed found salvation, he firmly establishes a symmetry between photography and the human desire for immortality, just as easily seen in his timeless vignettes of Hollywood icons. With Vanitas, Rolston challenges the limits of death and decomposition to find elegance within the human form, probing to assert that beauty may yet be found even within strands of crumbling bone and flesh.
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