Darren Wardle: Painting Now 2024

Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Darren Wardle constructs epic architectural dreamscapes in spectacular decay, suspending the past’s crumbling monuments in impossible, neon-soaked futures where the material and virtual entwine.

Anchored by his monumental work The Afterlife of Things, Wardle’s Painting Now series is a fabulous visual odyssey through collapsed utopias and overgrown ruins, all suffused with a perfectly controlled, gauze-like effervescence in delicate tonal gradations. Drawing on his doctoral research and recent experiments with AI-assisted technologies, it melds the ascendant possibilities of the digital sphere with a masterful approach to painting honed over a four-decade career.

“We are enveloped in ruination. Empires decline, structures decay and landscapes fall into ruin, along with our bodies,” says Wardle, who was recently an artist in residence at the globally renowned Leipzig International Art Program. “Decay and ruination are undaunted by technological obstacles; they make no distinction between us and nature.” A lecturer and PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts, Wardle has shown widely at galleries and museums across Australia and abroad – including London’s Saatchi Gallery – and was commissioned to complete a large-scale wall mural for Shepparton Art Museum.

The artist’s formal enmeshment of painting tradition with cutting-edge technology is synced to his work’s conceptual crux; its optically charged entanglement of the past and future, real and imagined, beauty and decay. By breaking painting open these experimental possibilities, Wardle embodies the ambitions of our Painting Now program. Work from the artist’s extraordinary new series can now be previewed and acquired by request at Michael Reid Sydney.

For more, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au