Matthew Rolston
Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits
Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
September 25 - November 8, 2025
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, 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.
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.
At ArtCenter College of Design, Rolston will further 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 ArtCenter’s 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.
A single work will be shown at a solo exhibition that will open with a 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.
All works, regardless of exhibition venue, will be available exclusively through Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will also offer an artist-signed edition of the exhibition’s accompanying monograph.
Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits
Nazraeli Press, Mid-September 2025
A special edition of 500 copies
presented in a custom clamshell case
Hardcover: 12.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches,
118 pages, 50 four-color plates
ISBN: 978-1-59005-588-5 - $225.00
Book Cover Courtesy of Nazraely Press
FAHEY / KLEIN GALLERY
148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036
