Everything is Healing Nicely
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Emerging artist Daryl Waller returns for his second solo show in London this March. Everything Is Healing Nicely at the Coningsby Gallery, Tottenham Street will showcase 30 paintings on canvas and paper, plus drawings and sculptures all made in the past year.
28-year-old Daryl was born in Cornwall and graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2003. His work is owned by private collectors including EMI Senior Vice President Michael Smith and Daily Mirror Sex Doctor Catherine Hood and is included in large collections such as The Wellcome Trust. Daryl previously had shows with the A&D Gallery and the Foster Art Gallery, both in London.
Daryl says of his work: ‘When I make paintings I’m really trying to make songs. My drawings and paintings are my music, I try to give them a beat, a volume, bass line and guitar feedback depending on how I’m feeling or what I’m trying to express. Songs are mostly about a love or hate of something and so is my work. Influences for this set of paintings include The Fall’s Live at the Witch Trials album, Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love and the writing of William Hazlitt.
Daryl’s work offers an honest account of humanity through drawings, paintings and animation. His work shows the full range of human contradictions united in uncompromising blunt honesty - both masculine and feminine, violence and love, beauty and ugliness, naivety and knowledge, nihilism and joy.
Artistic Director of Kneehigh Theatre Emma Rice, the proud owner of several Daryl Waller paintings said: “Daryl is, quite simply, a genius. He speaks of the dark truths of modern life with tender humour and jaw-dropping honesty. Daryl is funny, Daryl is moving, Daryl creates beauty where there ought to be none. He is more than an artist; he is a way of seeing. Daryl is my hero.”
His alter ego Swiftie is already well known on the underground scene in Cornwall through chalk and pastel drawings on streets and walls, handmade books and animation at film nights.
Controversy never seems to be far behind Daryl. Last year in a group exhibition at the Vitreous Gallery, in Cornwall his painting of a rabbit with the word DIE for a mouth caused outrage among residents of the retirement home opposite, resulting in the gallery’s first written complaint. The offending painting now proudly hangs in the gallery’s private collection.
Daniel Brant, owner of London’s A&D Gallery, enthuses: “Daryl’s viewpoint, style and subject matter are unique and his work is infused with a male romanticist ethos that is painfully absent in contemporary culture. It is full-on twisted, idealistic, alienated, bitter, adoring, stalking, vengeful, melancholic, pained, romance expressed as obsessive images that shout defiance but scream fragility.”