NYAB Event - Tim Kent "All That is Solid Melts into the Air"

Tim Kent "All That is Solid Melts into the Air"

Factory Fresh

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The New York-based painter Tim Kent (born in 1975) has used mostly figurative motifs for his large-format canvases, which he weaves between abstraction and representation in order to present the viewer with a depiction of reality that is constantly redefining itself.
With All That is Solid Melts into the Air, Kent has based his latest paintings from a passage found in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in which the great political thinker poetically imagines a future that resonates with our current American culture:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy profaned, and men at last are forced to face… the real conditions of their lives and their relations with fellow men.
In reflection of this, Kent explores the darker side of contemporary experience. He explores the idea of the residue of memory, the mundane recurrence of events that seems to be the only objective assertion of existence.
Kent’s works are widely inspired from the history of painting- finding traces from Francisco Goya, Canaletto and Edgar Degas to Chaim Soutine, Frank Auerbach and Cecily Brown. In these paintings, Kent’s muted pallet gives way to tough, direct brushwork and crackling use of tonal patterning. Their large format engages the viewer as an active participant in the painting’s narrative—a true voyeurism, as noted by Edward Winters in Aesthetics and Architecture( 2007 Continuum Press, London):
There is a claustrophobic inclusion of the spectator in Tim Kent’s painting…. The spectator finds himself in the architectural space as the sole occupant, reversing the natural role of looking. The depicted space is usually thought of as being looked into. Here the spectator is, to some degree, included in the picture space; whilst that which is usually the spectator’s attention, the figure framed in the picture, is absent.

Tim Kent was born in Vancouver in 1975. He studied in New York and received his Bachelors in 2001 in Fine Art and Art History from Hunter C.U.N.Y. From 2004-2005 he completed an MA in Visual Culture at the University of Sussex at West Dean College (UK) gaining a distinction. Shortly afterward he exhibited with Moncrieff- Bray Gallery (UK) working with English artist Pippa Blake on the Flux Project in 2005 which centered on a three month residency at the gallery. This was followed by two solo shows in England, the first at Queen Street Gallery in 2006 and then again with Moncrieff- Bray in 2007, both were met with commercial success. Most recently he has worked with the designer Miles Redd and Hugo Boss. He is a regular lecturer at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom and an emerging talent on the international art scene. Kent Lives and Works in Brooklyn, New York.