Will Brown is pleased to present After Morandi, an exhibition of recent paintings by San Francisco based artist Daren Wilson. Drawn to the mysterious stillness in the work of Italian still life master Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), Wilson was inspired to learn to paint in oils. From his bedroom studio in the spring of 2011, Wilson began to copy the master’s paintings, over and over, dozens of times. Over the next several months, Wilson created roughly 60 Morandi copies to exact scale. Gathering source material from assorted monographs and countless websites, Wilson sought to remain as faithful as possible to recreating each and every original brushstroke—except those that comprised Morandi's signature. Uninterested in forgery, Wilson's paintings hover in a remarkable middle-ground between contemporary art and contemporary apprenticeship—a study not only of Morandi's metaphysical realism, but also of the subjectivity of translation itself.
"They're not mine, my paintings, but they're not really his either; it's more like a limbo situation. It's like a 3D photo of a Morandi maybe."
Daren Wilson: After Morandi is accompanied by a 28-page catalog of the same name published by Glass, house. The catalog includes 35 reproductions, an interview with the artist, and a short essay by Glass, house.
