Inman Gallery is pleased to present Adrift, a solo exhibition of new work by Darren Waterston. Utilizing both galleries, the show features a suite of 12 paintings, 20 works on paper, and a site-specific mural installed in our south gallery. We welcome you to an artist’s reception Friday, September 13, 6–8pm, followed by an exhibition walkthrough on Saturday, September 14, at 1pm.
Darren Waterston creates richly layered, sensuous paintings, that encourage the viewer to sit with deep human emotions centered around love, loss and human endurance. The exhibition’s title, Adrift, calls us towards the emotional sensations of being unmoored and untethered. With references to abstracted landscapes, wherein pictorial space is destabilized and ethereal, the works explore the sensory experience of floating outside of the body, representing in-between states of dream and awake. At times terrestrial, marine or celestial, the atmospheres depicted feel humid and thick, enveloping the viewer in a rich cloak of saturated color.
Informed by composers like Claude Debussy, music offers an entryway into Waterston’s painterly abstractions. Musicality permeates the exhibition, with titles such as Partita and Lento, allowing tempo, tenor, and movement to become frameworks to encounter the picture plane. Motion within these mysterious spaces is requisitely slow and processual, reflecting the artist’s measured hand. The material range of substrates offers its own cadence, a crescendo to the mural enveloping us in its swirling terrain.
This is a momentous occasion for the gallery; Adrift marks Waterston’s tenth solo show with Inman since 1998, and importantly, this exhibition will be our last at Isabella Court ahead of the gallery’s move into our new building this winter. Darren Waterston’s exhibition chimera was the first show at Isabella Court in July 2004, in which he created a site-specific mural – a first for the gallery and the artist. It is an honor to welcome Darren back, 20 years later, as the coda to this chapter of Inman Gallery, a celebration of two decades of the gallery’s history and friendship with the artist.
Darren Waterston (b. 1965, Fresno, CA) has been exhibiting his paintings, works on paper, and installations in the U.S. and abroad since the early 1990s. His work draws inspiration from varied sources, ranging from French Symbolism, to Byzantine panel painting, to Flemish landscapes, to the Surrealists. Recent solo exhibition highlights include Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre: Whistler’s Peacock Room Reimagined at Victoria and Albert Museum (2020); Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre, The Smithsonian Institution's Freer/Sackler Galleries (2015–2017); and Darren Waterston: Uncertain Beauty, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2014–2015). He graduated with a BFA from the Otis Art Institute in 1988, having previously studied at the Akademie der Künste and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, both in Germany.
Waterston's paintings are included in numerous permanent collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; New York Public Library, New York, NY; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Waterston lives and works in Kinderhook, NY.
