DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY.- K21 presents Darren Almond, through May 29, 2005. The exhibition in K21 is the artist’s first museum exhibition in Germany, and with some 15 individual works and series it provides an overview of his work from the past eight years.

Darren Almond was born in Wigan (England) in 1971. His works have been shown in many solo and group exhibitions in famous galleries and museums in Europe and the USA.

His main themes are time and geography. In a very poetic way, he translates the usually abstract ideas of time and space into concrete sculptural or pictorial signs. To do so he uses such diverse media as photography, installations, film and video.

Travel is the subject of – for example – Almond’s Plaques, which are inspired by old English railway plates. Here, it is connected with subtle historical references to the last days of the industrial age in his British homeland.

In the course of his travels to the Arctic and the Antarctic over the past three years, Darren Almond made an intensive physical and psychological experience of space and time. During these journeys he produced the two films A- and Arctic Pull as well as two series of photographs that are presented and juxtaposed in the exhibition.

With the landscape photographs (Fullmoon) taken by moonlight since 2000, Darren Almond achieves a further symbiosis of technical refinement and poetic reference. With the camera, he traces the motifs of landscape painters such as William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, and translates them into a different medium. While the landscape has only shadowy visibility to the naked eye, the lengthy exposure suddenly reveals it in a bright, silvery light.

Other works in the exhibition visualise time in the form of clocks. Darren Almond also gives a voice to man’s tireless struggle against time in a work such as Bad Timing, in which the sound module of a normal-looking clock quietly utters the word ‘shit’ with each passing minute.



The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, 50 moons at a time, will bring together the whole series of the Fullmoon photographs made so far for the first time in an art book and an interview between Darren Almond and Julian Heynen. The book is published by Verlag Walther König and is available at the museum shop for € 25,-.

A lithograph of Darren Almond is published within the K20K21 edition series: Fox Talbot Fullmoon, 2004, original lithograph of 5 stones, print run 100, price per sheet € 750,-.


Biography

1971 born in Wigan, England
1993 Graduation Winchester School of Art

Darren Almond lives and works in London.


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