Darren AlmondThe Giverny Polaroids

“Apart from painting and gardening, I am good for nothing,” Claude Monet wrote to a friend, thereby giving his preference to a life in Giverny, which lies 3 km from Vernon on the Seine as it comes from Paris. He had arrived here in 1883, first remodelling house and garden at considerable expense and turning the Clos Normand into an ornamental garden. Later, in 1893, he bought an additional large plot of land across the road, today’s Chemin du Roy, where he had his famous water-lily pond laid out with the Japanese bridge that was to determine the motifs of his work from 1897 until his death on 5 December 1926. The road is one of the reasons why even Monet produced no other view of the bridge; it is also said that on his instructions his gardeners cleaned the road dust off the water lilies every day, until he finally simply had the road asphalted at his own expense. Darren Almond, born in 1971, lives in London today and works with great effort on photography by the light of the full moon. His participation in 1997 in the legendary exhibition “Sensation”, the pavilion he filled at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and not least his nomination for the Turner Prize in 2005 have made him one of the outstanding English artists of the present day. Following his survey exhibition at the Villa Merkel and the accompanying slipcase edition “Nocturne”, the present publication, with its new photographs of floral motifs in Monet’s garden, emphasises the sculptural quality of Darren Almond’s photographic work. The individual flower photographs can therefore also be detached from the book block, which is protected by a translucent plastic sleeve into which a small signed Polaroid image of the famous water-lily pond has been inserted.