Darren Waterston deconstructs the pastoral in Works and Days exhibition at DC Moore Gallery
Darren Waterston, Swans Like Me, 2025. Oil on wood panel, 60 x 60 inches.
NEW YORK, NY.—
DC Moore Gallery is presenting Darren Waterston: Works and Days, an exhibition of new paintings, works on paper, and a site-specific mural. Waterston’s new body of work explores the history of landscape painting and the inherent tensions in the genre. Following the completion of site-specific murals for the Frick Collection this year, the new paintings further develop his study of the pastoral landscape. Taking inspiration from Italian and Northern Renaissance landscapes, Waterston complicates these idealized visions of nature and reveals their underlying psychological dimensions.
This new body of work also draws inspiration from the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s epic poem Works and Days, from which the exhibition takes its title. A foundation of pastoral literature, Hesiod’s conception of human life as gradually degrading from an idyllic harmony with nature was later taken up by Renaissance painters. The figure of the shepherd appears as witness and caretaker of natural phenomena and the cycles of life and death in nature. Waterston was inspired by this balance of hope and pessimism in the human condition. The paintings embrace this unresolved tension between beauty and toil, merging abstracted and figurative forms in a destabilized pictorial space.
Waterston also weaves in the history of the sublime landscape, a vision of nature that reaches a deeply psychological level of both fright and awe. Considering the sublime as a site of simultaneous beauty and discomfort, he confuses our sense of perspective, shifting between scales that could either be microscopic or monumental. Each painting operates in its own visual syntax, evoking its own sense of time, rhythm, and movement.
In many of the works, Waterston stabilizes the foreground with figurative elements, such as thin, spectral trees or rocky mountain faces. Beyond these grounding elements lies unknowable, seemingly infinite expanses. In Swans Like Me (2025), the horizon line is disrupted by undulating blue vibrations that overwhelm the mountain vistas. These wave-like forms evoke geodes and sine waves, suggesting a timescale that exists beyond the perceived world.
The mural, painted on four walls, extends the fantastical environments of the paintings, creating an immersive atmosphere within one room of the gallery. Inspired by woodblock prints and etchings, the graphic patterning contrasts with the lush, layered paintings.
Later this year, Darren Waterston will be the Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, leading towards a 2027 exhibition at the same museum. His celebrated installation Filthy Lucre: Whistler’s Peacock Room Reimagined, a detailed and decadent re-interpretation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler's famed Peacock Room, will be exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2027. Filthy Lucre was previously exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2020); The Freer/Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC (2015-17); and originally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2014-15).
