**These original works are available via private sale only. Please email hello@artforchange.com with your interest.

Digital photography, social media, and information technology serve as points of departure from which Darryl Westly develops his paintings, which vacillate between abstraction and representation. Utilizing an assortment of mediums and techniques, the artist distills various aspects of our visual culture—whether it be footage from a police body camera or the restaging of a historical artwork. Born in Chicago and based in New York, he aims to highlight the ways in which contemporary aesthetics reflect the past, as well as our understanding of ourselves and the surrounding world. Westly’s works have been exhibited at venues that include The Hole, Los Angeles, CA; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; and Alexander Berggruen Gallery, New York, NY. Additionally, he completed a permanent public art installation in 2023, for the MTA’s Long Island Rail Road.

Interior/Exterior Ciel (2024) depicts a lone figure standing by a swimming pool, in a yard distinguished by desert plants such as cacti and palm trees. The work exemplifies the artist’s trademark style, wherein different images are layered and condensed before colors and details are simultaneously added and removed. The process mimics the ways in which we digest information from our cell phones and the internet—particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic, which has further deprived people of routine, physical interaction. Westly also places an emphasis on the symbology of color, which he regards not only as means to guide the viewer’s eye throughout his kaleidoscopic composition but also to expose the social connotations that we implicitly place on certain shades and tones.

Darryl Westly
Interior/Exterior Ciel, 2024
Oil on linen
36 x 24 inches

With environmental conservation a central tenet of ART FOR CHANGE’s mission, the artists invited for this exhibition confront and contribute to the move toward sustainability by exploring nature and the environment through content, methods, inspiration, or process. In conjunction with the exhibition, ART FOR CHANGE and Phillips will plant 1,000 trees to help counter the CO2 emissions produced by the art industry.

For this collaboration between Phillips and ART FOR CHANGE, Westly notes, “Investing in sustainability is not only beneficial to the continuation of life on this planet, but to the future of art itself. To cherish art is to cherish the beauty of the world that surrounds us. The process of painting reinforces this, as it juxtaposes the inherent beauty of the natural world with the mystery of the artificial unique to every artist.”

Darryl Westly, Interior/Exterior Ciel, 2024; Original Painting