We Love Darin. For the LA and SF-based artist, painting is an act of intuition — a practice of playing with color and experimenting with shape until the work becomes something he couldn't have planned. Rooted in modernist abstraction yet shaped just as much by skateboarding, graffiti, and the architecture of the city around him, his compositions balance gestural energy with quiet restraint, rewarding anyone willing to slow down and look.
Darin Balaban
“I'm not interested in making a perfect painting. I'm interested in making one that surprises me. If I can get to that point, there's a good chance someone else will find something in it that I never intended. To me, that's the whole point.”
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Selected Exhibitions
Group exhibition, Alto Gallery, Denver Group exhibition, 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco Group exhibition, Moth Belly Gallery, San Francisco Upcoming: Group exhibition, ABV Gallery, Atlanta
Special Projects
Large-scale commissions completed for Substack, Dunkin', Rolling Loud Festival, the Intuit Dome, and the City of San Francisco
Press
Featured by The San Francisco Chronicle, CBS, and Westword
Darin typically begins a painting with a clear starting point — whether a digital sketch or a composition he can't shake — but rarely ends up where that framework predicted, as intuition takes over and the unplanned moments become the ones worth keeping. His process is one of sustained attention, where each decision reshapes the next: colors shift, shapes get pushed around, and passages are painted over, scraped back, or abandoned entirely, until the work surpasses the original plan.
Select Work by Darin
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and/or, 2026
acrylic on canvas
30 × 40 inches
