Darren Sylvester
‘Party up on Skull Rock’
Brunswick
1 Aug.–30 Aug.2025
Neon Parc is thrilled to present ‘Party up on Skull Rock’, a solo exhibition of new work by Darren Sylvester, opening at Neon Parc Brunswick on Friday 1 August, 6–8pm.
In his latest body of work, Darren Sylvester mines the highly stylised surfaces of contemporary life—its promises, poses, and emotional mechanisms—with a glossy precision that evokes the effects of pop music videos and high-end advertising—where emotion is engineered, not felt. Comprising four large-scale photographs, two ‘lightspeed’ paintings, and a suite of sculptures, the exhibition continues Sylvester’s exploration of pop-cultural mysticism and the thin veils of desire, artifice, and identity.
Darren Sylvester works across a wide range of disciplines, including photography, sculpture, music and installation, embedded with commercial pop cultural reference tinged with ennui. In his large-scale photographs, which resemble luxury commercial photography, he co-opts the language of consumer aspirations. Various references including film, fashion, pop music videos, consumerism and capitalism come together in works that maintain a disquieting balance between the convincingly real and strangely artificial. The scenes in each photograph are constructed with laborious intensity, ultimately becoming frozen narratives (a plane flying into a clouded sunset; a crouching basketball player; models become pirates) with enigmatic and ambiguous poignancy. His work wryly merges low consumerism with high art, broadening the intersection between the commonplace, branded desires and glorified opulence.
In 2019 his work was the subject of a major survey exhibition and monograph at NGV Australia, titled ‘Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something’. Selected recent group exhibitions include ‘Namedropping’, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania (2024); ‘Maria Kozic x Darren Sylvester’, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2023); the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: ‘Free/State’, (2022); and ‘The National’ at Carriageworks, NSW (2021).
Darren Sylvester’s work is held extensively in public and private collections in Australia and internationally, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne; Artbank, Australia; Macquarie Bank Collection, Australia; Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Perth; Daniel & Danielle Besen Collection, Melbourne; and Sir Elton John Collection, London; in addition to significant private collections internationally throughout the United States, China, Holland, Switzerland, Singapore and Japan.