Tim Kent

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present Edges Off a Model, Tim Kent’s second solo show with the gallery since joining its roster in 2021. In his latest body of work, Kent turns his focus to artmaking, exploring the spaces in which painters and sculptors seek inspiration. Blending realism with elements of surrealism, Kent’s newest paintings showcase the artist’s masterful ability to create enigmatic depths that unsettle the viewer’s sense of what can be seen and what is hidden. While firmly anchored in the history of European painting, Kent also plays with new technologies, merging and layering these different visual codes in works that seem simultaneously contemporary and classical. Edges Off a Model presents nine of the artist’s latest paintings and will be on view on the first floor of Hollis Taggart from September 12 through October 12, 2024, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 12, from 5-8PM.

Trained as an architectural painter, the Canadian-American artist Tim Kent (born 1975) honed his skill while painting stately homes across the UK, including Castle Howard, Wentworth Woodhouse, and Holkham Hall. While initially interested in rendering these architectural landmarks realistically, Kent later became much more fascinated by the psychology of these interiors and how to visually depict the many moods and histories they hold. Over decades of travel and careful observation, Kent has amassed a large collection of images of these and other architecturally significant spaces as well as his memories of them. He has studied artworks referencing these spaces as well as how generative AI software processes images of them. While the interiors in Edges Off a Model may seem highly-specific and detailed, they are simultaneously unidentifiable, with Kent applying his precision to an amalgamation of images and memories that have blurred together into de-historicized and fictional places.

Kent’s interiors are filled with artworks – Venetian carpets, marble sculptures, royal portraiture, and medieval tapestries draw the viewer into deep spaces that encourage slow-viewing. Even as he tempts the viewer to identify them with his precision and detail, these artworks are as anonymous and unspecified as the architecture that houses them. Toying with art history and blurring the vocabulary of artistic masterpiece from Greek sculpture to French rococo, Kent challenges the viewer to become comfortable with the unknown – a feeling emphasized by the artist’s interest in folding screens, which appear as a motif and obscure parts of his interiors in many of his latest paintings.

While Kent has long-explored the psychology of space and the tensions between the seen and the unseen, his newest work feels more autobiographical in this exploration. In the foreground of many of these paintings, Kent has centered the figure of an artist, often depicting them lost in thought or very focused on their craft. As an artist who is well-versed in art history at the same time as he plays with and subverts it, this subject matter suggests a depth to these canvases that is as personal as it is physical. This idea is analyzed further in the catalogue essay, written by the art historian Charlotte Kent, the artist’s wife.

Kent holds an MA from the University of Sussex at West Dean College, UK, and a BFA from Hunter College, NY.  He has exhibited widely across the United States and abroad, most recently in solo shows at JD Malat Gallery in London and Pilevneli in Istanbul. His work is in various public and private collections, including the 21C Museum in Louisville, Kentucky and the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York. Kent lives and works in Brooklyn.

For more information about Tim Kent: Edges Off a Model, please contact us at info@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.

For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska at aga.sablinska@gmail.com or +1 862.216.6485.