The first painting that stunned Daniel Malarkey made his stomach lurch. In 2006, he saw Edvard Munch’s Love and Pain (1894) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and felt “butterflies jumping around” in his body. The reaction was so physical it initially confused him. “That was perhaps the first time when I saw an artwork where I couldn’t really understand what it could do to my body,” he told me. Music can elicit this reaction easily, he said; with visual art, it is far harder to come by. He’s made a career of chasing that feeling ever since.
On a recent Zoom call from his London home, Malarkey swings his laptop around to show the results of this chase: an Anna Calleja painting of postcards clipped to a string, a small painting by Patrizio di Massimo, an ’80s Luis Caballero painting, a Paul P. work, a painting by Chicago Imagist Tom Schneider, a tiny Sophie Barber work on paper, and a Carroll Dunham tucked onto a wall are among the highlights. “They create some sort of story for your home,” he said.
A man about town in the London art world, Malarkey approaches collecting like storytelling, a habit that traces back to his training in theater at Cours Florent and film at La Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III. That background still guides him, whether he’s curating a gallery show at the likes of Alison Jacques, working with clients, or buying art for himself. He’s interested in the transition from viewing art to falling in love with it, and then deciding to live with a piece. For him, it’s not just what one chooses to buy, but how, where, and with what context it is given.
“It affects every day,” Malarkey explained. “How does [art] change your daily enjoyment? There’s something about looking at pieces where you know the story of the artwork, the artist, you understand why you love that piece, and you see connections between pieces in the collection.”
When buying art, it’s advisable to think less about what’s fashionable and more about what you want to wake up to, he says. “I often tell people the pieces that will become the most valuable are the ones you’d never want to sell,” he said. Part of that relationship is learning how to look. “Sometimes people think, ‘Oh, you should just like an artwork because I’ve shown it to you,’” he said. “No, you need to understand the language of the artist…Then you can start thinking about which work would be right for you.”
Once a work that fits this criteria is found, themes and experiences can then guide the next steps. In a client’s living room, for instance, a painting by the late American painter Juanita McNeely depicts a nude self-portrait of the artist. “It makes me think of the word ‘resilience,’” Malarkey said, noting McNeely’s decades of health struggles and overlooked status in art institutions. Beneath the painting sits a Jean-Marie Appriou table sculpture of Ophelia drifting into water. The dialogue between the two is what inspires Malarkey. “To have that in the same room with [McNeely’s] self-portrait, where she spent her life between life and death, that’s super interesting,” he said.
In another home, he placed English artist Derek Jarman’s only 1991 white landscape painting near British painter Maggi Hambling’s portrait of Oscar Wilde dying in Paris. These are two entirely different artists, but together they form a tender, if unexpected, story. Malarkey explained that Jarman, in his dying wish to the director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, demanded a sculpture of Wilde in London. The artist the museum selected, coincidentally, turned out to be Hambling.
Conversations between artists and artworks across generations can also yield rewarding insights. One client now lives with two paintings by the British artist Celia Paul hung beside a work by the late Welsh painter Gwen John. Paul published a book, Letters to Gwen John, where she wrote to the long-deceased artist, despite never meeting. In this domestic pairing, those imagined exchanges feel literal. “It gives [the owner] so much joy seeing those together,” Malarkey said.
Artworks, for Malarkey, can interact with a room historically and emotionally, but it all comes down to trusting that gut instinct and finding the works you want to live with. It’s important not to rush that process. “It’s really lovely with art—what makes it something you can do your whole life as a collector—is when you wait 10 years to get that piece you’ve always wanted,” he said. “There’s nothing like hanging that piece.”
The arrival is slow, but the impact is immediate. One small shift in the room can give the sense that something new has entered your daily life. It’s in finding those connections that Malarkey is still back in front of that Munch painting—waiting for the jump in his stomach that tells him he’s found something special.
