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13/3/2009

Darren Almond

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce an exhibition by Darren Almond
featuring photographs of his recent Fullmoon series.

Darren Almond works in a variety of media - photography, film and installation - to translate the abstract ideas of time, space and memory. Examining the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations, he produces works which have universal as well as personal resonances that regularly take him to distant places, as in his photographic series shot in Norilsk and Monchegorsk, former Gulags in Siberia.

In 2000, Almond began a series of colour photographs, known as the Fullmoons. The first of these, titled Fifteen Minute Moon, was an experiment: to see what would result from photographing a moonlit landscape using an extended time exposure. He shot his first Fullmoon photograph on a trip near the Montagne Sainte Victoire in France, which was inspiration for much of Cézanne’s last paintings. Almond continued the series by travelling to solitary sites that had inspired artists and writers such as Turner, Constable, Caspar David Friedrich and John Ruskin. By using only the moon as a source of light and an extensive exposure time, he creates meditative landscapes that bear a mysterious and lyrical atmosphere.

Almond’s new Fullmoons capture in an indisputable yet uncanny beauty the Huang Shan region in the Anhui province of China. Almond was especially drawn to the Yellow Mountain range, also known as Xihai or Huang Shan, with its magnificent peaks and canyons as well as extraordinary natural sites of Chinese spiritualism. Often translated into traditional Chinese landscape painting - which is generally called Shan Shui, or mountain and water - Huang Shan was first depicted in 1646 by Jiang Tao, who became later the Zen monk Hongren. After travelling extensively in southern China, Hongren was most impressed by the isolated Yellow Mountain area. He developed a unique style of landscape with his sharp and angular brushstrokes.

Almond travels to remote locations that reveal an emptiness of the human spirit while challenging the sense of one’s own isolation and insignificance. Removed from the bright-lights and clamor of the city, Almond’s mystical landscapes – with their notion of melancholy - are not only shaped by the moonlight but also by the historical associations that surround them.

Photographs of this series are currently exhibited at Altermodern: Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London.

sometimestill is Almond’s fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler.

Darren Almond was born in 1971 in Wigan, UK. He lives and works in London. His solo exhibitions include Parasol Unit, London (2008), SITE Santa Fe (2007), Museum Folkwang, Essen (2006), K21, Düsseldorf (2005), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2003), Tate Britain, London (2001), Kunsthalle Zürich (2001), De Appel, Amsterdam (2001) and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999). He has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2009), Albertina Museum, Vienna (2008), ICA, Philadelphia (2007), Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (2007), MCA, Chicago (2005), The Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London (2005), La Collección Jumex, Mexico City (2003), Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2003), Berlin Biennale (2001), Venice Biennale (2003), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turino (1999) and ‘Sensation’ (1997-1999): Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Image: Shan Shui Fullmoon, 2008, C-Print, face mounted onto perspex 121,2 x 121,2 cm

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Opening Saturday, March 14, 6 - 8 pm

Galerie Max Hetzler
Zimmerstrasse 90/91 - Berlin
Tuesday - Saturday 11 am - 6 pm
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