White Room: Linda Darling

Linda Darling’s paintings and drawings are based in evolution. Past works have explored Darwin’s concept of sexual selection, depicting fish and birds whose notably vibrant colors and exaggerated features developed as a strategy for reproductive survival. The paintings featured in her White Room feature bonsai, trees bred to represent an optimal state of nature in miniature scale. Their gesture, form and mimicry of the landscape in a single container suggest the desire to manipulate nature into a more perfect form. All of Darling’s current paintings use an overlapping circular pattern derived from an Apollonian gasket. This geometric figure, composed of many generations of its own repeated form, implies the exaggerated and the diminutive, as well as aspects of time, rhythm, and process. Darling holds a MFA from Yale University, and a BA from University of California, Berkeley. Her work has also been exhibited at Judy Goldman Fine Arts in Boston, Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, CRG Gallery in New York, and Fotofest 2000 in Houston, among other venues.