Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

PRE-ORDER ONLY / SHIPPING LATE OCT

First edition of Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits by Matthew Rolston (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

About

Matthew Rolston’s Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits is a handsomely bound, generously sized limited-edition monograph – presented as a deluxe volume within a protective clamshell case.

Photographed in 2013 at the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily, Vanitas, a project more than a decade in the making, draws its visual language not from photographic tradition, but from painting. As inspiration, Rolston looked to the Austrian and Belgian Expressionists Egon Schiele and James Ensor, and to the School of London painters, especially Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. From these artists he borrowed an unflinching gaze, a palette Rolston has described as “the colors of a bruise,” and a fascination with flesh as both physical material and emotional terrain. The portraits are staged with a highly controlled use of theatrical lighting. Viewing the work may confuse the eye. Are we seeing a painted surface, or the detailed forensics of a high-resolution photograph? Vanitas is not an act of documentation. It is a highly expressive reflection on imperfection and an inquiry into the ultimate truth of death. These portraits ask us not to turn away, but to consider what it means to see, and be seen, at the edge of mortality.

The publication includes texts from the artist in addition to an introductory essay by American author, photography critic and journalist Philip Gefter and a foreword excerpted from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s seminal 1973 work The Denial of Death.

Lavishly printed in four colors on rich clay-coated stock and bound in linen over boards, this first printing of Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits  is limited to 500 copies and is published to coincide with Rolston’s 2025 multi-venue exhibition of Vanitas.