NEW YORK, NY.- Hollis Taggart announced its representation of artist Tim Kent, who joins the gallery’s growing contemporary program. Kent’s work examines the dynamics of power as experienced through architecture and the formal vocabulary of art. His own paintings, which embrace both soft painterly gestures and crisp graphic lines, often depict architectural spaces and landscapes disrupted by the incorporation of grids or other geometries as well as figures in motion. Hollis Taggart previously included Kent’s work in its fall 2020 exhibition Figure as Form and in its recent online presentation for art miami. The artist will be featured in a group show at the gallery’s location in Southport, Connecticut later this year and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Hollis Taggart’s Chelsea flagship in March 2022.
Kent is a first-generation Canadian American artist from Turkish and English parentage. As an immigrant to the United States, he has actively engaged with shared and personal histories and the ways in which those experiences are shaped by structures of power. In particular, he has been inspired by how power is manifest visually, through articulations of space—both interior and exterior—and cultural artifacts such as art. In his paintings, he often explores these ideas by creating relationships or dualities, whether between figure and space, historic and contemporary elements, or sensations of motion and stasis. Kent is equally fascinated by disrupting these existent systems and structures. In instances, he breaks the scenes that he conjures by painting in the lines of perspective that ungird the work and give it its three-dimensional depth. In other works, he introduces imbalances of scale between figure and space or spatial ordering systems that are out of context.
Kent first began painting architectural spaces more than 20 years ago as a student at West Dean College in East Sussex. Hired to render magnificent historic homes throughout England, Kent developed a keen eye for articulating with rich realism the physicality of a space and through painterly gesture its aura. Throughout his career, Kent has maintained his commitment to both representation and abstraction as a means of conveying history, experience, emotion, and psychology—elements inherent to both the human figures that may pass through the spaces he paints and within the walls of those spaces themselves. Indeed, his paintings shift compellingly between sharp, graphic lines that speak to our technologically infused contemporary era and soft abstractions that suggest the passage of time or a hazy, distant memory.
“We are delighted that Tim is joining the gallery. We have been so inspired and impressed by his work, which so beautifully melds figuration and abstraction and engages in new ways with the long history of painting. We look forward to bringing his work to new audiences and expanding awareness of his practice,” said Hollis Taggart.
Kent (b.1975) has exhibited widely across the United States and abroad. His most recent solo presentations include Enfilade (2020) and Dark Pools and Data Lakes (2018), both at Slag Gallery, New York. He has several solo exhibitions forthcoming, including at Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Montreal in fall 2021 and at Pilevneli Gallery in Istanbul in fall 2022. His work has been covered widely across international art and architecture publications. Kent holds an MA from the University of Sussex at West Dean College, UK, and a BFA from Hunter College, NY. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
