Artists

Darren Almond

Press release

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, is pleased to present Between the Lines, a solo exhibition of new works by Darren Almond. In the first gallery, Almond's large-scale painting Monolith acts as an underlying manifesto for the rest of the exhibition. A clearly defined zero emerges from its arboreal background, a form with multiple readings as a conceptual symbol: from the signalling of infinity, to the vanishing point of perspective, to Buddhist philosophies of 'nothingness'. The zero as a figure can act as both a beginning and an endpoint, where life and presentness sit within bracketing eternities – a brief, luminous interval between birth and death. Here, its form is intertwined with that of the suspended, naked branches of a willow tree in winter, as if seen while sheltering under its canopy, looking outwards to an undisclosed horizon. The use of highly diluted pigment across the canvas echoes the way water caresses a willow's branches during a rainstorm: the act of painting mirrors the physical behaviour of rainwater cascading under Earth's gravitational pull, completing the water cycle and circle of life. The willow, a tree intrinsically linked to water, becomes a symbol of cyclical processes throughout the exhibition. In Almond's Downpour paintings, which vary in palette according to the seasons they evoke, drip-marks and washes of diluted pigment register both subtle and heightened emotional shifts in atmosphere and seasonal time. Across these canvases, the willow motif reappears as a negative imprint, ghostlike and defined by absence: a place where real time and memory collide. 'I had this moment as a young boy,' Almond recalls, 'of being completely overwhelmed by the intensity of sunlight, of its reflection across the surface of the water, the silhouetted backlit branches of a willow hanging over the pond, the intense contrast of it all. It's an incredibly sharp, crystalline memory, and it's one I've carried for almost fifty years. When you hold onto memories for such an amount of time, they start to solidify, they inform and become you, become something more than themselves. That's why I felt it necessary to investigate this something I've cherished for all these years – memories veiled by the prismatic light of experience.' In Almond's Night Willows, image and retinal after-burn play a role in defining the paintings' depth, duration and exposure, revealing darker pathways within the compositions. Large panel works, gilded in gold, reflect and refract the ever-changing, ever-present daylight of the gallery space, positioning the viewer in the present tense. Through subtle variations of temperature and colour these paintings reaffirm the artist's interest in transition and the mutability of nature throughout the seasons. The gently swaying foliage, depicted in bright hues of green in Early Spring, gradually shifts to deep reds and oranges in Late Summer. In Spring/Summer the branches are omitted, evoking leaves backlit by bright golden sunlight. The motif of the zero recurs as a grounding presence, barely discernible against the glistening grounds. In the final room, Almond's two-panel, horizontally divided Senryu Carousel paintings convey a close-up of the willow, immersive and abstract. The extrapolated mechanics of time and the excerpts from differing seasons are juxtaposed with one another, marking a calendar that is at once past, present and future. The exhibition's final work, a cast bronze train-plate titled Train of Thought, installed in the gallery's winter garden, is inscribed with the words 'Between the Lines', inviting a moment of stillness and pause, as we read between the lines and think not in words, but in the shadow of words. Darren Almond (b. 1971, Wigan, United Kingdom) lives and works in Norfolk. In 2005, he was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in 1996 he was awarded the Art & Innovation Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art, London.