NEW YORK, NY.- An exhibition of paintings by self-taught artist Timothy Cummings will open at Nancy Hoffman Gallery today, where it will remain on view through Saturday, January 27, 2024. While most of Cummings’s paintings are dream-like fantasies filled with myriad detail and discovery, each has a figure or figures. Much of Cummings’s work addresses the issue of youthful turmoil, of that awkward moment between childhood and adulthood, of identity, of gender. The artist often paints figures as a child might conjure them in his/her mind, giving a dreamlike, fantasy quality to a grown-up persona.

Mostly intimate in scale on small wooden panels (from 8 x 10 to 38 x 48 inches), Cummings’s acrylic paintings, carefully and meticulously created, suggest a master’s technique with imagery that could only be contemporary. Inspired by Renaissance paintings as well as by primitive art, Cummings’s new works transport the viewer from this world into a world of transformation where anything is possible.

Timothy Cummings was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1968 where he grew up in the midst of Spanish Catholic and Native American culture, fertile with religious imagery and iconography in the churches. Murals and retablos he saw depicting death, martyrdom, and Day of the Dead imagery influenced him. Cummings is completely self-taught.

While most of Cummings’s paintings are dream-like fantasies filled with myriad detail and discovery, each has a figure or figures. Much of Cummings’s work addresses the issue of youthful turmoil, of that awkward moment between childhood and adulthood, of identity, of gender.

The artist often paints figures as a child might conjure them in his/her mind, giving a dreamlike, fantasy quality to a grown-up persona as he has done in this painting.

Mostly intimate in scale on small wooden panels (from 8x10 inches to 38x48 inches) Cummings’s acrylic paints, carefully and meticulously created, suggest a master’s technique with imagery that could only be contemporary.

Inspired by Renaissance paintings as well as by primitive art, Cummings’s new works transport the viewer from this world into a world of transformation where anything is possible.

Nancy Hoffman Gallery
Timothy Cummings: Blue Boy
December 14th, 2023 - January 27th, 2024