About
Darren Wardle makes art that lives within an uncomfortable space, often oscillating between the extremes of beauty and ugliness. Known for his majestic psychedelic exterior and interior architecture paintings the viewer is seduced on the one hand and left running for the exit on the other. His paintings depict the familiar but reveal the hidden – that which we prefer not to see – all at the same time. They ruminate on the notion of the modern architectural ruin: physical and metaphorical. They celebrate high modernism in order to comment on the world we currently live in: high consumerism. They are a visual representation of the fine line between utopia and dystopia where a slippage from one to the other is only a matter of inches. They are real and unreal.*
*Dr Vincent Alessi, 2014, excerpt from: “Darren Wardle: Head Case”, Catalogue Essay: Darren Wardle: Head Case, La Trobe University VAC, Bendigo, AU
Darren Wardle is a Melbourne based artist with four decades of practice, during which time he has held about thirty solo exhibitions and has exhibited in galleries and museums across Australia, the USA, Germany, China, Singapore, New Zealand, Korea and the UK. His paintings and prints are held in major public, institutional, and corporate collections.
Wardle has received numerous grants, has been a finalist in esteemed prizes, and an artist in residence at prestigious international studio programs. He won the Gold Coast Art Prize in 2013, exhibited at Saatchi Gallery, London in 2014, and completed a large wall mural commissioned by the Shepparton Art Museum in 2016.
Recently he was an artist in residence at the Leipzig International Art Program located at the Spinnerei, an internationally renowned centre for contemporary painting in Germany. During his residency his work was featured in curated exhibitions in Berlin and Leipzig, including Michael Reid Gallery.
Wardle’s work has been reviewed in art journals, magazines, and newspapers around the world, and he has been featured in two ABC TV documentaries: one for Artscape and the other for Sunday Arts.
Wardle has lectured in painting at Monash University, RMIT University and is currently a lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, where he is also a PhD candidate researching the significance of ruin theory and the aesthetics of decay in contemporary art practices.
