Darren Waterston
All Passions Spent, 2026
Oil on wood panel
60 x 74 inches (overall)
Elegy to Edvard Grieg, 2026
Oil on wood panel
48 x 36 inches
Incidental Music, 2026
Oil on wood panel
48 x 36 inches
To Grieg: Lyric Pieces no. 2, 2026
Oil on wood panel
20 x 18 inches
To Grieg: Lyric Pieces no. 7, 2026
Oil on wood panel
20 x 18 inches
Flurry, 2026
Oil on wood panel
30 x 36 inches
For the 2026 edition of The ADAA Fair, DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by Darren Waterston inspired by his enduring fascination in the synthesis of sound and image.
As part of Darren Waterston's broader investigation of visual and musical disciplines colliding, he manifests syncopation, rhythm, and movement onto canvas, resulting in richly-colored abstract paintings. While creating this body of work, he immersed himself in the music of Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian composer of Romantic-era masterpieces. Each painting’s distinct color palette and abstraction is evoked by his synesthetic experience of the score.
Like Grieg, who pushed the formality of artmaking into abstraction, Waterston reinterprets and reimagines sound from that particular point in history into a resonant, contemporary experience. As a direct visual response to the music, these luminous paintings are, ultimately, soundscapes.
In May 2027, Darren Waterston: Filthy Lucre will open at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, an immersive installation that reimagines James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s famed Peacock Room. Waterston recreated almost every detail of Whistler’s masterpiece, transforming the room into an uneasy experience of destruction and twisted excess, drawing parallels between the economic inequality of the Victorian era and today.
From June–September 2027, Waterston will complete The Drawing Room, a newly commissioned immersive installation for the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, in conjunction with the Cecilia Beaux: Gilded Angst exhibition. The Drawing Room will further explore the psychological undercurrents of Beaux’s work, inviting an experience of the simultaneous beauty, splendor, and unease of the Gilded Age. The installation will travel to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (October 2027–January 2028) and to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (February–May 2028).
