Darren Waterston

Filthy Lucre, presents a dystopian version of The Peacock Room, James McNeill Whistler’s 1876 decorative masterpiece. Waterston's work, like The Peacock Room, probes and considers the conflation of painting, architecture, patronage, and artistic ego. The project was conceived specifically for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and first exhibited in 2014. In May 2015, it opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, while The Peacock Room of the adjoining Freer Gallery of Art undergoes renovation.

Of The Flowering: The Fourfold Sense, DeWitt Cheng wrote: "Darren Waterston’s older paintings were lyrical misty landscapes with silhouetted flora and fauna. His newer works, symbolist abstractions, become mindscapes in which ambiguous transparent forms arise, float, flutter, and sink amid mist, clouds, swirls, drips, and vermicular coils of brushstrokes; each image with its poetic cycles of life represents the cosmos as 'a divine chaos.'"

In 2011, Waterston finished Forest Eater which comprised approximately fifty paintings and works on paper and four site-specific sculptures. The largest of the sculptures is “Wrath,” a forbidding eighteen-foot long vertical lava formation, which hung from the museum’s ceiling. The project was conceived specifically for the Honolulu Contemporary Art Museum

Darren Waterston (born 1965) is an American artist who is mainly known for his ethereal paintings.

Waterson was born in California in 1965. He received his BFA at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. From 1986-87 he studied at the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, Germany and Fachhochschule für Kunst, Münster, Germany.