Darren Almond (b. 1971)

CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM: A SELECTION OF WORKS FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

A collection of contemporary art exploring contemporary horizons of painting, photography, and the intersections between the two. From the poetic Abstract Expressionist inheritance of Jimmie Durham and Bjarne Melgaard to the cool architectural eye of Candida Höfer, the collection bears witness to a carefully curated spectrum of international postmodern imagery. The conceptual camerawork of Thomas Demand sits potently alongside photography translated to painting in the work of Koen van den Broek; the philosophical poise of acclaimed Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco offsets Kyle Thurman’s joyful alchemy of flower pigments. Highlighting the collection’s technological edge, Michael Riedel’s serigraphy investigates the inner workings of a Powerpoint slideshow, capturing the essence of the moment between clicks, while Darren Almond tracks time and space through a photographic performance piece. Similarly process-oriented is the tight sequential minimalism of Nathan Hylden, following strict cinematographic codes. The vibrant worlds of modern image production and reproduction are appraised in vivid variety, unified by a keen sense of pictorial power.

Darren Almond’s diverse work incorporates travel, trains, clocks and televisions which are all ingredients for works that meditate on changing conceptions of time and space. Rise and Fall (2000) is a photographic work that fuses body time to clock time, a performance piece in which Almond sets out to physically experience, each minute of an hour. Every time the digital clock in his studio flips over to the next minute, he takes a photograph. With a blue and pink hue creating an organic wash of colour, Almond lays out the resulting 60 images across a fixed sequential grid. Time is pictured according to the logic of the clock, as a series of fixed, discrete, elements occurring spatially between two points. Almond was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2005 and is included in several major collections such as Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Tate Gallery and The Saatchi Collection, London.