Darren Waterston: A Tiny Radiance In a Dark Place

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist Darren Waterston. This show marks Waterston's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from May 7 through June 25, 2026. The gallery will host an artist discussion, moderated by Timothy Anglin Burgard, Distinguished Senior Curator and Curator in Charge of the American Art Department, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 7, 2026, followed by an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. 

Building on his career-long exploration of the pastoral, Darren Waterston’s latest body of work explores psychological visions of nature, using music as a source of visual inspiration. By immersing himself in compositions by Benjamin Britten, John Tavener, Philip Glass, and Nico Muhly, among others, Waterston’s practice has become a deep study of the synthesis of time, rhythm, and movement, allowing his paintings to unfold in syncopation with the musical spaces of his chosen compositions.

While Waterston has long probed the tensions between representational and abstract forms within the genre of landscape painting, this exhibition represents deeper delving into abstraction. In each painting, the viewer encounters a profound sense of movement. Floating fields of color act as ethereal expanses, enveloping subtle figuration drawn from nature, such as trees and mountains. Sweeps of color and light ripple like sonic waves. As Waterston allowed music to inform his paintings, subtle shifts emerged in the rhythm of gesture, the envisioned colors corresponding to notes, the forms that arose, and even in his application of paint.

With a particular interest in historical conceptions of the sublime, Waterston investigates the tension between its evocation of beauty and terror. As the sublime landscape often acts as a site of both awe and destabilization, it offers terrain for contemplating how scale and perspective shape perception. This unresolved nature of consciousness, and the fluctuation of perception, is conveyed in Waterston's paintings, which exist as amalgamations of dreamlike, observed, and historical worlds. Deriving its title from “Toad,” a poem by Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, that reflects on finding beauty in the unsightly, Waterston alludes to both the time and place of these works–made during a harsh winter in upstate New York, amid a year of broader sociopolitical unease–considering how we might find radiance in a dark place. 

Drawing from Northern Renaissance painters, as well as the Surrealists and Symbolists, Waterston's work traces a genealogy through a range of art historical techniques and iconographies. Using traditional preparation and oil glazing methods, he begins by applying rabbit skin glue and genuine gesso to the panel, reapplying and abrading layers before underpainting with bole—a clay pigment traditionally used by Renaissance painters to warm gold leaf.

Darren Waterston was an Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (2025), leading towards a 2027 exhibition at the same museum. His celebrated installation Filthy Lucre: Whistler’s Peacock Room Reimagined, a detailed and decadent re-interpretation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler's famed Peacock Room, will be exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2027. Filthy Lucre was previously exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2020); The Freer/Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC (2015-17); and originally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2014-15).

Darren Waterston has exhibited his paintings, works on paper, and installations in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the New York Public Library; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Seattle Art Museum; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He received 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 currently lives and works in Kinderhook, New York.