The centrality of the willow to this exhibition is rooted in a childhood memory of fishing beside a willow tree in a flooded mining pit near Wigan, UK – the slender shape and gentle curve of the willow’s branches and leaves providing the artist with a motif that he has returned to in recent years. Named for the way rainwater gathers and drips from its pendulous branches, the willow here becomes a conduit for Almond’s ongoing engagement with the cycles of the natural world.

During the recent winter months, Almond observed how rainwater caresses branches of the willow, weeping tears at their tips before returning to the ground. This combined agency of gravity and light formed the geneses for the new ‘Salix Triandra’ paintings (2025) and the work ‘Transition’ (2025). In these works, Almond has used highly diluted washes of colour, turning to gravity’s grace to emulate the behaviour of rainwater with pigment. Creating tendrils of translucent colour, Almond then erases the wash of paint towards a distant horizon, establishing a sense of depth within the picture plane. In these aqueous evocations of the willow tree, Almond captures not only the behaviour of water but also its capacity to hold and refract an array of changing colours and light to prismatic effect.

Continuing his focus on the descending branches of the willow tree, Early Summer, Late Spring and Éostre (all 2024) are set within the animated movement of the foliage. Emerging from the gilded backgrounds is a faint zero symbol, barely discernible against the modernist grid underpinning the composition. For Almond, zero is ‘the nothing that holds everything together’, a paradoxical threshold where existence and non-existence converge. Almond’s faint evocation of zero intersects with the grid, another of the artist’s motifs, eliciting a tension with the organic forms and speaking to the human impulse to impose structure on nature – to chart, regulate and direct.

Similarly, in the ‘Senryū’ series – named after a Japanese poetic form similar to haiku, known for its satirical reflections on human nature – Almond charts the gradual transitions of the seasons through the defining image of the weeping willow. Each linen diptych is overlaid with thin layers of metal leaf, with silhouettes of the tree’s distinctive hanging branches at varying stages of growth. Notably, the willow is among the first trees to sprout leaves in spring and one of the last to shed them in autumn. The metals themselves function not as fixed signifiers but as fluid, transformative elements, shifting from gold to copper to palladium to evoke the vegetal, tonal and atmospheric progressions throughout the seasons of the year. Senryū (Autumn) (2023) is rendered in gold, its leaves a burnt orange. The sequence culminates with the palladium surface of Senryū (Winter) (2024), with its silvery ground against the willow which now appears brittle and skeletal, its leafless branches embodying both the state of dormancy and the promise of renewal.

While the ‘Senryū’ paintings are fundamentally concerned with variation and evolution, they are unified by the inclusion of a large zero, which is subtly debossed across the centre of each diptych. This faint but deliberate introduction of an integer functions as a conceptual symbol, signalling infinity; an otherworldly lens or portal; the perspectival vanishing point; and Buddhist ideas of ‘nothingness’.

Almond’s use of numbers and grids operates as a formal syntax that describes the fluid, multifaceted character of time. As the artist has remarked, numbers are ‘our true common language’ – we use them ‘to position ourselves, to relate to each other; we use them for scaling, we measure our lives by them, we gauge our children by them’. In his ‘Entropy’ series (2018–24), the zero is a visual device that centres and anchors the composition of eight-panel works amid a proliferation of other fragmented numerals. The multiple panels and the layered, almost glitchy, arrangement of these numerals recalls digital flip clocks, a technology that visibly and audibly registers the passing of hours and minutes. By presenting numbers in states of fragmentation and disarray, Almond challenges conventional ideas of temporality as being fixed or linear, instead proposing one that is multi-layered. Through these works, time is not only conceptualised through symbolic, numerical systems but is also materially inscribed onto the very surface of the work.

Throughout ‘Night Before Day’, the presence of zero functions as a quiet fulcrum around which Almond’s meditations on impermanence and transition revolve. Equally, the artist has traced the dancing wisps of the leaves of the weeping willow tree to distil the poetics of the natural world entwined with the complexities of time lived and felt. Whether located in a childhood memory, the passing of seasons or the desiccated numerals, time emerges in Almond’s work as a complex interplay between natural cycles and our fragile endeavours to measure and order the world.

Darren Almond was born in 1971 in Wigan, UK and lives and works in Norfolk. Solo exhibitions include Museo Cappella Sansevero, Naples, Italy (2025); Jesus College, Cambridge (2019); Villa Pignatelli-Casa della Fotografia, Naples, Italy (2018); Mudam, Luxembourg (2017); Museum Sinclair Haus, Bad Homberg, Germany (2016); New Art Centre, Salisbury, UK (2016); Neue Galerie, Graz, Austria (2015); Dirimart, Istanbul (2015); Bloomberg Space, London (2014); Art Tower Mito, Japan (2013); Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid (2013); Château Gallery, Domaine Régional de Chaumont-sur-Loire, France (2012); The High Line, New York (2011); Villa Merkel, Esslingen am Neckar, Germany (2011); L’Abbaye de la Chaise Dieu, France (2011); Frac Normandie, Rouen, France (2011); FRAC Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand, France (2011); Parasol Unit, London (2008); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany (2005); Tate Britain, London (2002) and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France (2023); Parasol Unit, Venice (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Getty Center, Los Angeles (2021); Fondation Van Gogh, Arles, France (2020); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2018); Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2017); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2016); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2015; 2000); Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2015); Helmhaus, Zurich, Switzerland (2011); 6th Biennale de Curitiba, Brazil (2011); Miami Art Museum (2011); Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sûr-Seine, France (2010); Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2009); Frac Lorraine, Metz, France (2009); 2nd Moscow Biennale (2007); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2007); The Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London (2005) and 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003).