DARREN ALMOND

Inflection Point 2022, inaugurated at Hetzler Marfa (permanent installation)

Installation view: Hetzler Marfa, Marfa, Texas, 2022, photo: def image
Installation view: Hetzler Marfa, Marfa, Texas, 2022, photo: def image

HETZLER MARFA is pleased to present Inflection Point, 2022, a new work by Darren Almond, created as a site-specific, permanent installation for the new exhibition space.

British artist Darren Almond works in a variety of media including photography, film, installation, sculpture and painting. His diverse subjects deal with abstract ideas of time, space, history and memory and how these concepts relate and intersect. He examines the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations to produce works that have historical as well as personal resonance.

In his sculptural work, Almond often materialises notions of time or place as both real and imagined constructions. With this permanent and site-specific installation, the artist deals in both of these notions. In mathematics, a point of inflection is a point on a curve where the sign of the curvature changes. Linguistically, the inflection point is a turning point, or even a milestone. Almond’s Inflection Point, 2022, marks a specific place within the vast openness of the Texan landscape. The steel work fits into its location and almost blends with the background colours of the grasslands. The doubling of the words along the top, which are repeated in an inversion of themselves, looks like the shadow play of the bright Texan sun. As a gate, it is open to both sides, with the sentence ‘SPACE BETWEEN THOUGHTS’ readable both on arrival and on leaving the site of the exhibition space.

HETZLER MARFA is a new exhibition space opening on 26 May 2022. The programme features an annual exhibition alongside artist residencies. The space is open Thursday to Sunday from 11am to 7pm, and by appointment. It will be closed in August and will reopen in September 2022.

Darren Almond (*1971, Wigan, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. In 2005, he was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in 1996 he was awarded the Art & Innovation Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Almond’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international institutions including Jesus College, Cambridge (2019); Villa Pignatelli-Casa della Fotografia, Naples (2018); Mudam, Luxembourg (2017); Museum Sinclair Haus, Bad Homberg (2016); SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo (2016); Kunsthaus Graz, Graz (2015); Domaine de Chaumont-sur- Loire, Chaumont-sur-Loire (2012); Villa Merkel, Esslingen (2011); and FRAC Haute Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen (2011), among others. Almond’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand; FRAC Haute Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen; Kramlich Collection, San Francisco; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; and Queensland Art Collection, Brisbane, among others.

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Installation view: Hetzler Marfa, Marfa, Texas, 2022, photo: def image
Installation view: Hetzler Marfa, Marfa, Texas, 2022, photo: def image

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DARREN ALMOND

Crossrail Art Programme commission publicly unveiled (permanent installation)
Bond Street station, London
24 October 2022

Darren Almond, Horizon Line (Bond Street Tube Station), (detail), 2020, Photo: Crossrail, 2022, © Darren Almond
Darren Almond, Horizon Line (Bond Street Tube Station), (detail), 2020, Photo: Crossrail, 2022, © Darren Almond

British artist Darren Almond has created three artworks for the new Bond Street station to commemorate the recently opened Elizabeth Line in London.The largest work, Horizon Line, is an expansive grid of fragmented numbers comprised of 144 individual hand-polished tiles cast in aluminium. The artwork is positioned over the main escalators in the entrance hall of the station, creating a landscape of continual movement and ever-changing subjectivity. At a distant point near the horizon rises a single complete number: a zero, the eternal symbol of the infinite.

In form and style, the other two works, titled Shadow Line and Time Line, draw upon the tradition of naming early British locomotives with cast bronze nameplates. Almond’s train plates, however, bear poetic phrases that offer a philosophical proposition to each passerby. Abstract in nature, the three works seek to activate a discussion around the mechanics of time and place.

Crossrail Art Programme

Darren Almond, Horizon Line (Bond Street Tube Station), (detail), 2020, Photo: Crossrail, 2022, © Darren Almond
Darren Almond, Horizon Line (Bond Street Tube Station), (detail), 2020, Photo: Crossrail, 2022, © Darren Almond

DARREN ALMOND

Darren Almond x Mats Gustafsson: Dark Light

© Studio Darren Almond
© Studio Darren Almond

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce a collaborative limited edition record comprising a unique artwork by Darren Almond and music by free jazz musician Mats Gustafsson, produced on the occasion of Almond’s exhibition, Dark Light on view at Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris.

Exploring the notions of dark and light, this collaborative album features two vinyls — one black and one clear — each with an artwork by Almond on one side, and music by Gustafsson on the other. In his improvised and experimental composition, Gustafsson who sees music as colour, density and form responds to these works through an innovative use of the saxophone as a conduit for breath. In Light, breath, usually silent and invisible, becomes an audible materialisation of air and life. In Dark, the layered sounds are pushed to their extreme and pared back to their essence, reflecting the subtleties of nightfall, the shades that are obscured and become one before revealing themselves again over time.

Handfoiled onto each of the records are abstracted numerical digits in gold and silver, pure conductors of light. When played, the clear record reveals the numbers orbiting on the reverse, occasionally catching the light as it spins, while the black record obscures the presence of the image. Playing on synethesia, the spinning numbers respond to the sound.

Almond comments "there aren’t many soloists on the planet that have the range and capabilities of Mats Gustafsson when it comes to describing landscape. Born in Lapland you can feel the Far North in his improvisations. When I was introduced to him and his music by Max Hetzler, I was taken aback by his deep rooted connection to the landscape. It’s embedded deep inside him and ranges from the great thaw to the vast expanses of the night sky. I’m privileged to have him respond to this exhibition in Paris at Galerie Max Hetzler. Dark/Light by definition is unquantifiable just like Gustafsson’s response. Limitless, singular, and awesome in its detailing. When sound becomes land, land becomes light and light becomes human.”

This record is available on our publications website.

© Studio Darren Almond
© Studio Darren Almond