Darren Waterston: Notes from the Air
DC Moore Gallery, New York
Through October 3, 2020
DC MOORE GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
dcmooregallery.com
DC Moore Gallery, New York
Through October 3, 2020
DARREN WATERSTON
Symphonic Landscape, 2020
Oil on wood panel, 59.5 x 71. 5 inches
© Darren Waterston, Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery
DC Moore Gallery presents Darren Waterston: Notes from the Air, featuring all-new paintings by DARREN WATERSTON. The exhibition title is taken from a volume of selected late poems by John Ashbery, whose themes of nature, wonder, and experience continue to be an important influence on Darren Waterston’s work.
Darren Waterston’s paintings are a continuation of his uniquely descriptive approach to expressing states of consciousness, using the landscape as metaphor and poetic space. The works depict otherworldly environments - nature as a heady fever-dream, destabilized, and teeming with quiet activity. They are alluring and on the threshold of the recognizable and the fantastical.
Darren Waterston asserts the ever-present Surrealist impulse, having looked closely at the work of Hercules Segers, Max Ernst, and Odilon Redon while developing these paintings last winter. He remarks of his process:
“I often start out constructing a painterly description of space and spatiality, which may include sky, clouds, rocky cliffs, a verdant glade, but with every descriptive execution there is always the counterpart of abstraction and playful distortion of what is being depicted. I love the interchange between the beautiful and the monstrous.” -Darren Waterston
DARREN WATERSTON
Hymn no. 2, 2020
Oil on wood panel, 48 x 36 inches
© Darren Waterston, Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery
This sublimity is further underscored by shifting perspectives, geological, voluptuous forms morphing diaphanously, and fluid layers of deep, saturated color. Darren Waterston is especially interested in exploring how a profound sense of vastness can be achieved and expressed in smaller scale panels, on view for this exhibit.
DARREN WATERSTON graduated with a BFA from the Otis Art Institute/Parsons, having previously studied at the Akademie der Künste and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, both in Germany. In 2020, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London opened Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre: Whistler's Peacock Room Reimagined, a detailed and decadent interpretation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler's famed Peacock Room, a sumptuous 19th-century interior.
Filthy Lucre was created by the artist in collaboration with MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts. His previous solo exhibition, Uncertain Beauty at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2014-2015), ran concurrently with the exhibition that featured Filthy Lucre at Freer | Sackler Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2015-2017).
Darren Waterston’s paintings are included in numerous permanent collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; New York Public Library, New York City; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The artist lives in New York City.
This exhibition runs concurrently with Valerie Jaudon: Prepositions.
DC MOORE GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
dcmooregallery.com
