Darren Waterston is an American painter best known for his lyrical abstractions resembling dripping organic forms and misty landscapes.
Born in 1965 in Fresno, CA, he studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles before attending the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin. In 2014, he gained critical attention for his solo show “Uncertain Beauty” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which later traveled to Washington, D.C. The exhibition included the installation piece Filthy Lucre Art, a contemporary reconstruction of James McNeil Whistler’s interior decorating project Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. “I think I wanted to have it be disorienting in some ways so that it doesn’t feel like there’s one very specific cataclysmic event that caused all of this,” the artist said of the project. “It’s trying to evoke a psychological state more than anything else.” Today, his works are in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Seattle Art Museum, among others. Waterston lives and works in New York, NY.