DARREN ALMOND: LIFE LINE
White Cube presents Life Line, a solo exhibition by Darren Almond, in which the artist’s new paintings embrace the instability of time, memory and place.
March 20 – May 4, 2024
Considering time as continuous and variable, real and abstract, Almond has consistently examined how our relationship to the natural world undergoes inexorable change. Attuned to layers of temporality – whether mechanical, physical or cosmological – Almond’s meditative abstraction ushers an intensified experience of time.
‘Life Line’ derives its impetus foremost from the artist’s childhood memory of fishing next to a willow tree, in a flooded mining-pit on the edge of Wigan – a resonant intertwining of industrial labour and leisurely tranquillity. Fascinated by the reflection of light upon this body of water, ‘Life Line’ introduces this early memory with an opening sequence of diptychs, presented on the ground floor gallery.
Though conceived from memory, these panels also reference traditional Japanese artforms, from the 17th-century Rinpa School of painting and the landscapes and ink drawings of master draftsman Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539-1610). Almond’s tonal use of gold echoes the techniques of the Rinpa School, where the hue was used to depict areas of water, creating arresting pools of light.
The use of metals in Almond’s painting can be read alongside his engagement with histories of industry, in particular the city of Norilsk, a mining area in Siberia located at the edge of the Arctic Circle. While Almond’s investigatory practice offers portraits of place that trace its legacies and narratives of human experience, these paintings offer an atmospheric and mercurial counter-image to the locations of Almond’s interest, evoking an open, extraterritorial space.
The interplay of colour, light and shape continues in the two centrally suspended paintings, though here the palette assimilates the spectrum of autumnal landscapes. In one of the paintings, Hatsuyuki (2024), a Japanese word for ‘first snow’, fragmented numbers interlock with rectangular shafts of white upon an aluminium background, their intervening forms evoking the very transitory state of snowfall.
Forming a poetic endnote to the exhibition’s meditation on nature, Fullmoon@Wall (In Memoriam) (2024) is installed in the lower-ground floor lobby. The photograph depicts the iconic Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, UK, cut down in 2023 in an act of vandalism.