Biography

Darren Coffield was born in London in 1969. He studied at Goldsmiths College, Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art in London where he received his Bachelor of Fine Art in 1993.

Coffield has exhibited widely in the company of many leading artists including Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Patrick Caulfield and Gilbert and George at venues ranging from the Courtauld Institute, Somerset House to Voloshin Museum, Crimea. His work can be found in collections around the world. In 2003 his controversial portrait of Ivan Massow, former chairman of the ICA in full fox hunting costume was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Portraits of George Galloway and Molly Parkin (NPG, 2010) followed, and most recently a depiction of former Miners Union leader Arthur Scargill made entirely from coal dust. In the early nineties Coffield worked with Joshua Compston on the formation of Factual Nonsense – the centre of the emerging Young British Artists scene. A new book by Coffield about this period in British Art, Factual Nonsense: The Art and death of Joshua Compston is out now published by Troubador.

Critic David Sylvester, known for his championing of his close friends Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, described in his Guardian obituary as ‘one of the finest writers on art in the second half of the twentieth century,’ described Darren Coffield as “Another of those magicians who (probably without knowing) knows how to imbue pieces of matter with light”.

In 2014, Darren Coffield was specially selected by the jurors of 100 Painters of Tomorrow as an artist who has made a significant contribution to the painting scene today.  

Education

• 1989 – 1993 BA in Fine Art (hons), Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK
• 1988 – 1989 Camberwell School of Art, London, UK
• 1987 Goldsmiths College, London, UK

Darren Coffield lives and works in London, UK.