Darren Almond describes a world free from the obstacles of time and space: enormous digital clocks traveling across the ocean, personal biographies becoming collective stories, time machines following ghosts of memory, fragments of history of the last century reemerging as private remembrances. In Darren Almond’s works, distance disappears and time stretches, while nature becomes an intimate landscape. For the ‘Fullmoon’ series, the artist photographed nature under a full moon, in the same sites where old masters such as Constable, Turner and Friedrich had painted their canvases centuries earlier. For his video ‘A’ Darren Almond traveled to the Antarctic shooting the dazzling and ever-changing ice landscapes.

Darren Almond is a tireless traveler through time: his work is a pendulum between the past and the present. In his oeuvre, the everyday heroes of our time and their stories compose the novel of History in which sense and sensibility fuse in both individual and collective narrations.

Darren Almond will present in November for the Nicola Trussardi Foundation his new video-installation IF I HAD YOU – an ideal sequel to his famous ‘Traction’ video. A lonely elderly couple dances to an old song; the slow steps follow History’s rhythm across the empty space of a dance hall.

Darren Almond was born in Wigan, England, in 1971, and now lives and works in London. He has had solo exhibitions in some of the most prestigious international institutions for contemporary art; among them Tate Britain and the Institute of Contemporary Art, both in London, the Zurich Kunsthalle and the Renaissance Society in Chicago. He has taken part in several important collective exhibitions worldwide, such as ‘Sensation’ and ‘Apocalypse’ at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and shows at other important venues as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam and the Museum Fredericianum in Kassel. His work was included in the most recent edition of the Venice Biennale, to which he brought – after several arduous and long trips around the world – ‘Meantime’, a digital clock set in a steel sea container. An out-of-scale white fan was his installation for the second Berlin Biennale of 2001; in Berlin, again he presented the video ‘Schacta’, an epic poem about work shot in the mines of Kazakhstan. Almond’s works are part of important collections of international contemporary art such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Saatchi Collection in London, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami and the Kramlich Collection in San Francisco. Darren Almond has been selected amongst the most interesting young artist to take part on the editorial cult project Cream 3, Phaidon Press (2003).

Overview