PATRICK MIKHAIL ANNOUNCES REPRESENTATION OF NEW YORK ARTIST TIM KENT

PATRICK MIKHAIL is pleased to announce representation of New York artist TIM KENT.  Kent is an internationally exhibiting artist whose professional practice aims to address narratives based around the mechanisms of history and personal memory, both of which are produced by the visual structures of power that inform our experience.  His work creates visual correlations exploring how experiences are mediated not only by technology but by the narrative of history.

Kent currently appears in the exhibition ABSTRAKSHN at Patrick Mikhail Montreal.  He will launch the gallery’s fall 2021 programme with a solo exhibition of new paintings, and will be featured in the gallery’s presentation at PAPIER art fair in Montréal in November 2021.

Tim Kent’s designs are based on images from personal archives and memories, as well as appropriated images from public archives.  These compositions coalesce in paint, which is applied by scraping, knifing, brushing, and spattering. Supporting these actions is an underlying perspective design.  Using long, hand-made rulers to trace intricate perspectival systems, which not only add context to the subject but also interfere and impose on the subject, he creates a logic of memory rather than merely one of measurement.  These foundational lines remain visible in finished paintings, nesting around figures, cradling walls, and branching off into deeper space.  In this way, his use of perspective shifts its semiotics from one that aims to define, focus, and clarify, to one that introduces complementary spaces and ideas, leaving viewers with the impression of simultaneous splices of time compressed into sometimes glitchy, shifting slides of experience.  The perspective grid becomes a visual metaphor for the interconnectivity of how we construct our visual world and its influence across every level of existence.

The key subject of Kent’s practice is the operation of power in history, technology, society, and art. Painting has its own relationship with power, both historically through creating representations of power players and events and through its construction of time and space using the perspective grid.  Power depends on appearances.  As such, painting reflects how power works; in this case, through forms such as architecture and symbolic hierarchies and relationships.  By revealing the structures that create the illusion of realism without simplifying them, multi-point perspective images present the overwhelming complexity of power while passages of abstraction inspire reflection.  In the context of the inordinately detailed images possible in today’s world, Kent’s paintings attempt to strike a balance between the hyper-real and abstraction, reminding us how humans see through ideas and not only perfectly rendered objects.

Tim Kent earned an MA Visual Art, University of Sussex at West Dean College, West Sussex, UK where he was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in a Masters Thesis; an MFA Post Graduate Diploma in Painting, West Dean College, West Sussex, UK; and a BA Art History/Hunter College, City University of New York, NY.  He was born in Vancouver, Canada to newly immigrated English and Turkish parents, before immigrating to the United States in 1990.

Kent has exhibited at numerous international art fairs including Volta New York, Volta Basel, and Pulse Miami.  He has also appeared in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions and projects including at: Hollis Taggart, New York; Hearst Foundation, New York; Whitney Museum online; Kunstverein Worms DE; ART@SAP Foundation DE; The National Arts Club, New York;  Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK; Slag Gallery, New York;  Brandt Gallery, Amsterdam; Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, London; Centotto Galleria, Brooklyn; Factory Fresh, Brooklyn; Queen Street Gallery, Chichester, UK

Essays, reviews, and critical discourses of Kent’s work have appeared in:  Lapham’s Quarterly, Artcritical, QuietLunch, Candid Magazine, New American Paintings, Brooklyn Magazine, Flaunt Magazine The Huffington Post, Elle Décor, Architectural Digest, Hyperallergic, Creem Magazine, Le Monde diplomatique, New Criterion,Fine Art Connoisseur, Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Magazine, New York Post, and The New York Times. 

Tim Kent is also represented by Hollis Taggart, New York, where he will be featured later this year in a group exhibition at the gallery’s location in Southport, Connecticut, and in a solo exhibition at their flagship Chelsea gallery in March 2022; and Pilevneli Gallery in Istanbul where he is slated for a group exhibition in summer 2021 in Bodrum, Turkey with a solo exhibition in Fall 2022.

For more information and media enquiries please contact:

Patrick Mikhail

Director

Telephone:  514.439.2790

Email:  gallery@patrickmikhailgallery.com