Tim Braden: Looking and Painting

Christopher Bedford, Dominic Molon & Jennifer Higgie 

Softcover | 23 x 1.8 x 28 cm | 160 pp

Art/Books | 2018 | 9781908970428

Assembling a body of work produced over the last decade, Tim Braden: Looking and Painting is the first monograph on the artist in ten years. It draws together the many themes and styles of his work, and includes many paintings that have never been shown in public previously. The book includes a response to Braden’s work by Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine, and contributions by Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Dominic Molon, curator at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

Constantly shifting between representation and abstraction, while referencing art, architecture and design and embracing the decorative, British artist Tim Braden’s work is a celebration of the act of making things. His expressive and lushly seductive painting explores the in-between spaces between categories and states, dissolving and reassembling the world in high-key colour and vivid brushstrokes to re-present reality as something new and newly felt. His painterly works, both abstract and figurative, often depict or imagine interior spaces such as homes and studios, or gardens and landscapes, as well as individuals working, making, or looking. Found objects and images play an important role in the practice. His paintings often evolve from historical photographs, book and magazine covers or anecdotes involving celebrated twentieth-century artists and designers such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Sonia Delaunay and painter-turned-Modernist architect Roberto Burle Marx. Braden also plays with scale and expectation, creating ‘found’ abstract compositions from cropped fragments of his own figurative works that are then realised as oversized paintings on canvas or small oil sketches on card.