Brooklyn-based painter Tim Kent depicts psychotically charged interiors and unsettling dreamlike-vistas. In Kent’s painting, architecture and landscape are fused with gestural brush marks and elements of abstraction, but the picture plane is never flattened. Rather, the viewer is drawn into a deep space enhanced by Kent’s characteristic, symbolic perspectival grid lines. A reference to the Renaissance system used for constructing pictorial space, Kent’s perspectival lines evoke contemporary technological, mechanical and social systems such as electric grids, building elevation lines, internet networks, social networks, the flow of politics and information, and displays of power.

The artist’s imagery has evolved over the course of several bodies of work including A World After Its Own Image (2016) Dark Pools and Data Lakes (2018) and Enfilade (2020).  Kent describes his paintings as sometimes “stemming from a reaction to an event or moment from my life or the world, which I then use as the basis for my work.”  In other instances, his compositions “refer back to my own archive, whether photographs I’ve taken or found, or an image from an earlier work that continues to attract me psychologically or aesthetically. As Kent develops a painting, “the subject moves into focus, usually revealing some form of juxtaposition or conflict which serves as the basis for a larger body of work. Certain themes recur, historical narratives as cultural capital, or the interiors of stately architecture as artifact and landscapes modified by industry.”  

Tim Kent (b. 1975) Print Thief, 2022 Oil on canvas 33 x 33 in. (83.8 x 83.8 cm)

Tim Kent (b. 1975) Ghost of an Idea, 2021–22 Oil on canvas 65 1/2 x 79 1/2 in. (166.4 x 201.9 cm)