Darren Almond
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22
Works
Darren Almond is a British contemporary artist born in Wigan, Lancashire, England, whose practice spans photography, film, sculpture, and installation. He is best known for his meditative explorations of time, landscape, and memory, often employing long-exposure photography to capture nocturnal scenes illuminated by moonlight. His celebrated 'Fullmoon' series — large-format photographs taken during full moons using extended exposure times — transforms familiar landscapes, including the Chinese countryside, Saharan dunes, and Arctic tundra, into luminous, otherworldly visions that collapse the boundary between day and night. These works render the world with an uncanny, hyper-real clarity that confounds normal perception of time and light.
Artists in conversation
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Sugimoto shares Almond's deep engagement with long exposure photography and philosophical meditations on time, using extended exposures to collapse duration into a single luminous image. Both artists treat the photograph as a conceptual vessel for exploring temporality and the sublime.
Michael Kenna
Kenna's nocturnal and twilight landscape photography employs extended exposures to render serene and atmospheric scenes with a similarly meditative and melancholic tone to Almond's work. Both artists focus on solitary, elemental landscapes that evoke stillness and the passage of time.
Andreas Gursky
Gursky shares Almond's use of large format photography to create monumental, conceptually rigorous images of landscapes and industrial environments. Both artists use scale and formal precision to turn documentary subjects into reflective, almost abstract experiences.
Artists who inspired them
Joseph Beuys
Beuys's expanded notion of art as a social and spiritual practice informed Almond's multidisciplinary approach and his use of installation and sculpture alongside other media. Almond's interest in time, memory, and elemental forces echoes Beuys's shamanic engagement with materials and meaning.
Caspar David Friedrich
Friedrich's romantic landscapes suffused with spiritual longing and the overwhelming power of nature are a clear precursor to the mood and imagery of Almond's moonlit wilderness photographs. Almond frequently cites the tradition of the sublime landscape as central to his Fullmoon series.
On Kawara
Kawara's conceptual obsession with marking and measuring the passage of time directly resonates with Almond's own sustained investigation of duration, presence, and temporal experience. Both artists treat time itself as the primary subject of their practice.