Michael Gregory: Far Side of Town | May 7 - June 25, 2026

Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Far Side of Town, an exhibition of new paintings by Michael Gregory. This marks his sixteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from May 7 through June 25, 2026, with a reception for the artist on June 25 from 5:00 to 7:00 PM.

Taking its title from Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” a song recounting the hardship of a South Dakota farmer, Gregory’s paintings engage the metaphors of the American West alongside the hopes, dreams, and labor bound to the land. His signature barns and silos emerge within rolling plains and expansive skies. Horizon lines undulate, hills rise and recede, and veils of fog and diffuse light surface through a restrained yet luminous palette. The scenes are at once intimate and familiar, yet temporally indeterminate, producing a quiet dislocation of place and history.

Gregory’s engagement with the American West resists deconstruction of its mythos, instead treating landscape as a register of time. Rendered with meticulous detail and measured symmetry, the paintings stage encounters with openness—roads and plains that convey both majesty and unease, the ethereal and the eerie held in tension. Rural structures, recurrent in his work, trace cycles of decay and renewal: their surfaces, though seemingly pristine, bear subtle inscriptions of weathering, positioning them as artifacts of both lived and imagined pasts. In these luminous, atmospheric fields, temporal distinctions collapse, suggesting that the land cannot be seen apart from the residues of its histories. Gregory’s work thus meditates on duration as it is inscribed across artifice and terrain, recalling T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Old stone to new buildings, old timber to new fires, old fires to ashes, ashes to the earth.”

Born in 1955 in Los Angeles, Gregory has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Boise Art Museum; Becton, Dickinson and Company; the Delaware Art Museum; the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science; the Honolulu Advertiser Collection; the San José Museum of Art; and the USEU Mission and Residence. Formerly based in Bolinas, California, he now lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York.

Darren Waterston: A Tiny Radiance In a Dark Place | May 7 - June 25, 2026

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist Darren Waterston. This show marks Waterston's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from May 7 through June 25, 2026. The gallery will host an artist discussion, moderated by Timothy Anglin Burgard, Distinguished Senior Curator and Curator in Charge of the American Art Department, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 7, 2026, followed by an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. 

Building on his career-long exploration of the pastoral, Darren Waterston’s latest body of work explores psychological visions of nature, using music as a source of visual inspiration. By immersing himself in compositions by Benjamin Britten, John Tavener, Philip Glass, and Nico Muhly, among others, Waterston’s practice has become a deep study of the synthesis of time, rhythm, and movement, allowing his paintings to unfold in syncopation with the musical spaces of his chosen compositions.

While Waterston has long probed the tensions between representational and abstract forms within the genre of landscape painting, this exhibition represents deeper delving into abstraction. In each painting, the viewer encounters a profound sense of movement. Floating fields of color act as ethereal expanses, enveloping subtle figuration drawn from nature, such as trees and mountains. Sweeps of color and light ripple like sonic waves. As Waterston allowed music to inform his paintings, subtle shifts emerged in the rhythm of gesture, the envisioned colors corresponding to notes, the forms that arose, and even in his application of paint.

With a particular interest in historical conceptions of the sublime, Waterston investigates the tension between its evocation of beauty and terror. As the sublime landscape often acts as a site of both awe and destabilization, it offers terrain for contemplating how scale and perspective shape perception. This unresolved nature of consciousness, and the fluctuation of perception, is conveyed in Waterston's paintings, which exist as amalgamations of dreamlike, observed, and historical worlds. Deriving its title from “Toad,” a poem by Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, that reflects on finding beauty in the unsightly, Waterston alludes to both the time and place of these works–made during a harsh winter in upstate New York, amid a year of broader sociopolitical unease–considering how we might find radiance in a dark place. 

Drawing from Northern Renaissance painters, as well as the Surrealists and Symbolists, Waterston's work traces a genealogy through a range of art historical techniques and iconographies. Using traditional preparation and oil glazing methods, he begins by applying rabbit skin glue and genuine gesso to the panel, reapplying and abrading layers before underpainting with bole—a clay pigment traditionally used by Renaissance painters to warm gold leaf.

Darren Waterston was an Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (2025), leading towards a 2027 exhibition at the same museum. His celebrated installation Filthy Lucre: Whistler’s Peacock Room Reimagined, a detailed and decadent re-interpretation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler's famed Peacock Room, will be exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2027. Filthy Lucre was previously exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2020); The Freer/Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC (2015-17); and originally at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2014-15).

Darren Waterston has exhibited his paintings, works on paper, and installations in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the New York Public Library; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Seattle Art Museum; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He received a BFA from the Otis Art Institute in 1988, having previously studied at the Akademie der Künste and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, both in Germany. Waterston currently lives and works in Kinderhook, New York.

Images:

Michael Gregory, Colloquy, 2026, Oil on canvas on panel, 56 x 72 inches