Tim Kent: Edges Off a Model by Hollis Taggart

MUSING, MUSES, MODELING, AND MODELS: MEANDERING WITH TIM KENT CHARLOTTE KENT

Theorist and artist, married and working, two lines in non-Euclidian geometry. Occasionally, elliptically, Tim and I intersect. Sometimes, hyperbolic in our efforts, we miss the point of contact. It’s a quirky vector space that we share with some strange attractors. We met in the 1990s, so he tells me, though I do not remember this. Proof exists, but what is that to memory?1 We did connect much later online—that really did happen—and then in person, a month before his opening of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, which launched fifteen years of conversations that now bring us to Edges Off a Model. Science and history, mathematics and mind, politics and perspective have moved through our discussions of art and technology, as much as Marcel Proust and Neal Stephenson, Helen Frankenthaler and Joseph Kosuth, Filippo Brunelleschi and Marcel Breuer. Haunted, like most, by the notion of influence, our work is both a part of and apart from each other’s, or in the musical terms that are significant to our amusement, my life in the bush of ghosts (thank you, Brian Eno and David Byrne), sure tracks like a rolling stone (ditto, Bob Dylan).2 With that, it turns out that we can turn into our work of musing, muses, models, and modeling as some ways to edge closer to the works at hand.

MUSING

Ekphrasis is the process of describing a work of art, transferring it from its medium of visual to verbal, made popular by Diderot in his accounts of the salons.3 For those who were not there to see the paintings themselves, it allows the audience to see the work in their minds and, at best, think about it for themselves.

Drawing Room (2024, pl. 9) is a square painting of a grand room in predominantly red hues of two women seated, one drawing the other. They are in the foreground, with a large dark and bare fireplace on the left side of the canvas (as if behind the artist with drawing board), while the mirror above it reflects the light coming from the window on the right. It glows a bright white into the composition and

diffuses into golden tones across the wood floor beyond and between them. Positioned along the back wall are three large paintings, abstracted and yet recalling the gestures of Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism . . . we’ve seen these paintings, maybe. There’s a folding screen, notably green, introducing the influence of Asian art on the late nineteenth century. And, seeing the delineated round column on a square base that separates the artist from all that I have described makes me realize everything is soft. Suddenly, I note her hair is short and her skirt calf-length, as if of the forties with its momentary potential for women’s labor and equality . . . the artist’s model, her hair piled in a loose Victorian twist, but I swear she is wearing jeans. Not where are we, but when are we? And what of that small white chair in the back, facing the window, almost in the middle of the painting?

In Venice (2024, pl. 8), the male artist’s head is bleared by paint, as so frequently occurs in Tim’s paintings,4 but this time by brushstrokes that seems to breach the work in progress to leap into the space of the artist, and yet—too broad for that painting—they move us out of the world of the easel painting, or of the artist in the painting, to the painting of this painting. Thrust out of the representational schema, I am back out here in the world. I force my way back in. Turning away from that vortex, I ground myself in the carpet, a foot, an easel, these firmly bound. But, making my way back up, the artist’s hand is indistinct holding the palette. Shifting away from this indeterminacy, a statue holds center court. The brushstrokes distinguish it, gestural liveliness. Light brightens it (except now I know this is all painted effect) from the window beyond the left edge of the painting— so that I am seeing what isn’t there. Between these two uncertainties, a woman on a chaise longue faces a mirror against the back wall, but she makes no sense there, and seems like some odalisque (of which Tim has made much in the last year5) so I look to see the frame that would wink at me that this was another recursive play, but there is no such structure even as it confounds the imagination that she is a model for the artist

given her proximity to the wall, hidden behind the screen . . . that screen again! But no, it is a different screen, a more realist, albeit romanticized, landscape. Still green though. What’s going on here?

MUSES

Tim frequently will have a recurring element across a series of paintings—an enfilade, a horse6—the folding screen has been notable recently. Especially in the context of his recent emphatic iteration of certain paintings, monuments, and sculptures, the screen suggests to me a diffusion of art’s particular creative muse, a folding away of one thing for something else. First in the background of The Study (2022, fig. 1) and more emphatically in The Lacquered Screen (2024) for his recent exhibition Histories in Flux, this recurring screen does a lot of work. Historically, it alludes to diverse cultures and styles. It separates and frames space. It makes present something private, a declaration of something you as viewer can’t access. I am

amused that it is always green (to be pedantic, a teal-turquoise in The Study). A green screen allows any backdrop to be inserted into a digital photograph or film. They are the space of projection (literally and psychoanalytically), here but not (their presence maintains an absence and their subsequent absence confirming the presence of the inserted image), all of which feels super-calli-surrealistic-expialidotious. Should I mention here that he doesn’t love painting with green? Does it matter that we both wake with an unpainted wood folding screen at the foot of the bed? What should I screen in these musings?

The excess of potential in interpreting the screen brings me to the provocation of abstraction and my sense of a shift. In The Sight of Death, a book I cannot recommend enough, author T. J. Clark wrote, “Seeing an aspect, seeing its semantic charge, then seeing how the aspect and the charge are inseparable from many other vectors in the representation, and must never have been separable.”7 The challenge is to see that. Reading Clark’s musings

fig. 1 THE STUDY, 2022, oil on canvas, 38 × 36 in. (96.5 × 91.4 cm), Private collection

fig. 2 ISOTOPIA, 2018, oil on canvas, 100 × 100 in. (254 × 254 cm)

fig. 3 FRAME RATE, 2021, oil on canvas, 24 × 24 inches (61 × 61 cm)

about Poussin got me to see in a new way, to find the line or stroke, the glitch or tempo, in any artwork that manages a crossroads of different possibilities. Objects have been more substantive than figures in Tim’s work. Though unsettled by their placement in destabilized time-space constructs, represented by proliferating perspective lines, objects do the cultural work of holding histories beyond the time of a single life.8 The dissipating figures’ transience, made so real by our jostling to identify what they are or are doing, also fade away from such efforts. Their wavering allows me a kind of presence.

I never liked portraits as a kid; they were too insistent and what I wanted from art was to get away from the world of people. I am relieved by the blurring of faces in Tim’s paintings. Perhaps, as a woman, the presence of anyone or anything’s gaze catapults me into self-consciousness that I am an object to be seen by others, and so must examine myself as through the other’s eyes9 . . . I am not sure. I know that it’s nice to be some place without that. I can look and

think and feel. The spectral figures and the brushstroke disrupting some representation move me out of a semantic singularity. Likewise, the blank floor or wall or sky in his paintings let my eye rest, without having to account for itself. Maybe something of pleasure in this undefined locale, which only works by accepting also the messy space of being, which is why I also so enjoy paintings like Vault (2024, pl. 7) where the plethora of stuff is ramshackle across the room punctured by a skylight.

Tim’s interiors not-quite-realness invite associations to surrealist dreamscapes and unconscious spaces, which by analysis, and semiotics in particular, can point to social imaginaries and political ideologies, structures of power both external to us and internalized. No doubt for this reason, his work was included in New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting (Monacelli Press, 2023) in a text examining the influence of that post-World War I movement, which attempted to find, in the words of André Breton in the Second Surrealist Manifesto—words

that might appeal to Clark’s own musing— the place where “life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”10 Less political antagonism, more uncertainty principle.

Though, I have no doubt that all this is working in his paintings (if only because I have sometimes been the one suggesting it to him), I struggle with the invocation of Surrealism because it feels too pointed, pat, sealed, and ready to be delivered in a lecture, especially if all we do is stop there. The eminent scholar Mary Ann Caws wrote in an essay that in Tim’s work she is “haunted by surrealist texts and images and beings, but won’t start there,” because to start or stop there misses where we are.11 Semiology, iconology, historicizing cannot satisfy the complexity of the art experience. The muse that calls us will not allow resolution.

The nine ancient muses of the arts were patrons. Flips the script a bit to think of them that way. In addition, though

associated with poetry and music, art and dance, there were also muses for history (Clio) and science (Urania). No doubt, history has been a fervent inspiration to Tim. This, not only because I listen to him enraptured by histories (how could I forget the endless weeks when he was reading Winston Churchill’s memoirs) or contextualizing things through his university study of art history, but also because history paints a picture that reveals certain uncertainties. Science does the same.

MODELING

Science and technology studies as well as continental philosophy inform my thinking about digital culture and the speculative visions of industrial strength technologies’ infiltration into the rest of culture. I am challenged not to presume similar concerns in Tim’s work, too. In 2019, we presented at the College Art Association on the history of visual technologies;12 the principles of perspective become crucial to mapping and surveying methods, as the use of triangulation defines topographical values—

fig. 4 STATIC FIELD, 2021–22, oil on canvas, 54 × 42 in.

cm)

fig. 5 DATA LAKE, 2018, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 in. (203.2 × 254 cm)

from the Portolan charts popular in the thirteenth century to early Mercator Projections of the sixteenth century, to the contemporary SLOAN Digital Sky Survey, and so we spoke about connectography, radio mapping and the British Chain HOME network, assorted distributed communication networks, and how they radiate into a way of thinking that some of us can’t help but visualize— see his Isotopia (2018, fig. 2), Frame Rate (2021, fig. 3), or Static Field (2021–22, fig. 4).

In the pubs of London, cafes of Istanbul, hills of Umbria, vineyards of Bordeaux, or on the New York City Subway, we debate the role of emergent technologies, a pervasive mathematical gaze in the datafication (and financialization) of culture, and the dissolution of rhetorical training (in visual and verbal disciplinary practices) that enables these systems not only to influence how we see the world, but alter what we look to see. When Tim pulls archival images (and draws from his own extensive photography practice),

he notes the changing relationship people have to the presence of the camera, interspersing those twists in his turn to the canvas, then layering the effects of the screen that touches the endless search for something. At the same time, we both reject nostalgia, coming in our separate ways from personal and generational and cultural histories that we don’t want to reproduce. History is made present to challenge the present’s casual dragging of wretched histories into the future.

Though I observe how Tim’s work introduces elements of non-human vision—barcodes in Data Lake (2018, fig. 5), or dot matrices in The Reproduction’s Gaze (2024), among others—it’s also been something I could not assert, because however much we connect about each other’s practices, the destabilization of power structures that has been key to both our efforts, and our passion for each other’s projects, also means relinquishing such convictions about what the other one is doing. I felt personal

fig. 6 GHOST OF AN IDEA, 2021–22, oil on canvas, 65 1/2 ×

vindicated when someone as steeped in art and technology as writer Alex Estorick commented that Tim’s paintings “absorb both analogue and digital modes of observation while challenging the reduction of life to a sequence of data points.”13

Things in the world feel so reductive and I am grateful for art modeling a more ambiguous way of being. This is to say, marriage to an artist challenges and reminds me when looking at any art to find how that artist introduces an escape path out of thinking something concrete. Wallace Stevens said: “If it is defined, it will be fixed, and it must not be fixed.”14 Like Stevens, I try to find a way to fit into words something of the unfixed.

MODELS

Fixity, like any fixation, is dull. Tim has used generative AI models to explore the modulation of light and its consequent color palette for rendering a work of his own. These products are like sketches. I remember the year he was training his hand to the brushstroke of Boldini and Sargent, then Degas and Cassatt, or the time he spent with the works of Kerry James Marshall. Every artist learns, through the frustrations of copying, that what emerges is one’s own hand. Since copying is hard, managing to do it, produces flexibility. The ability to offer a mere glimmer of a style and gesture is to catapult from anxiety of influence to the play of one’s own work.

Generative AI models enabled that when they wavered in their production of a style. Tim, like others, has commented how the increasing accuracy in the models presentation of “the style of” have made them more boring and less amenable to creative tooling. In a talk, the writer and musician K Allado-McDowell spoke about the improvements to Chat-GPT losing the peculiarities that allowed a poesy to emerge: “The crowd polishes the edges off a model,” which I noted in an article and has since stuck with me, and further in a conversation with Tim then inspired the title of this show.15 Painting, photography, and generative AI can model something, but become more interesting as a tangent bundle for a manifold life. Such edges are creative terrain, that liminal zone where the order of things swerves in and out of functionality.

In general terms, a model is aspirational, something to be copied, a point of reference. Models can be descriptive, representational, inferential, and even . . . productively

false.16 They are, by necessity, simplifications. They are always products of the past, and though treated as if they prescribe the world and predict the future, they are actually means to explore possibilities.17 They are not the thing itself, but their own thing. Nelson Goodman in The Languages of Art described a model as “something to be admired or emulated, a pattern, a case in point, a type, a prototype, a specimen, a mock-up, a mathematical description—almost anything from a naked blonde to a quadratic equation—and may bear to what it models almost any relation of symbolization.”18 Have I been a model in Tim’s paintings? Both yes and no. Some have noted a gesture that is undeniably like one of mine. But to say that it is I, well, that takes it too far. Having been an artist’s model for much of my twenties, I have always felt that way, no matter how realist the final image. More than depiction, I think we model a work ethic, a commitment to coalescing some kind of clarity while retaining the breathing space of ambiguity.

So, I will return now to that drawing room, and the white chair placed off center, to rest with an off-kilter gaze towards the light beyond. I don’t know what’s there, or what’s next, but the model for its possibility emanates.

fig. 7 ABSURDIST, 2021, oil on linen, 39 × 29 inches (99.1 × 73.7 cm)

Charlotte Kent, Ph.D., is an arts writer based in New York City and Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Head of Visual and Critical Studies at Montclair State University. She is co-editor of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (Intellect Books, 2024) and an Editor-at-Large for The Brooklyn Rail with a monthly column on art and technology, two terms she interprets loosely as a way to address ways of seeing social formations, political structures, and ecological contexts. She contributes to arts magazines, academic journals, and museum and gallery catalogues about the intersection of contemporary art and digital culture. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ New Dangers and Opportunities of Technology and Google’s Artist + Machine Intelligence program. She also co-curated Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems (2023) as the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Nxt Museum, Amsterdam.

1. Jerome Groopman, “Can Forgetting Help You Remember?,” The New Yorker, May 13, 2024, newyorker.com/ magazine/2024/05/20/ why-we-remember-charan-ranganath-book-review.

2. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); David Byrne and Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Sire · E. G., February 1981; and Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia Records, August 1965.

3. Ruth Webb, “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre,” Word and Image 17, no. 1 (1999): pp. 7-19; and Denis Diderot, Salons (Paris: Gallimard, 2008).

4. It’s so common as to be hardly worth noting, except that the painter in Venice (see pl. 8) reminds me so much of the one in Ghost of an Idea (2021–22, see fig. 6), which suggests a narrative of certain characters in Tim’s works.

5. Tim Kent works that riff on JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814): Inclinations (2024), Odalisque (2023), The Lacquered Screen (2024), The Reproduction’s Gaze (2024), and Forgery of Love (2023).

6. See Enfilade, held at Slag Gallery in 2020. Also, after time at Wentworth Woodhouse in England, where the painter George Stubbs was commissioned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham to paint portraits of the Earl’s winning race horses, Tim did a series of paintings around that particular eighteenth-century episode, which has since evolved into an interest in equestrian statuary and monuments generally: The Knights Heir (2013), Calibration (2013), Archive II (2023), Out Out! Brief Candle (2023), Muniments I (2023), and Muniments II (2023).

7. T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 133.

8. Hannah Arendt, “Culture and Politics,” in Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018).

9. Charlotte Kent, “Surveying and Being Surveyed: Gendered Insights in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing,” in John Berger: Telling Stories, eds. Ralf Hertel and David Malcolm (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2015), pp. 211–32.

10. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 123.

11. Mary Ann Caws, Tim Kent: Between the Lines (New York: Hollis Taggart, 2022).

12. Charlotte Kent and Tim Kent, “Schismatic Technics: Visualizing Systems from 1600 to Present” in Metaveillant Issues, College Art Association, New York, February 17–21, 2019.

13. Alex Estorick, “Tim Kent’s Painterly Assault on History,” ArtReview 76, no. 5 (summer 2024), p. 99.

14. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 34.

15. Charlotte Kent, “Art’s Intelligence: AI and Human Systems,” The Brooklyn Rail, April 1, 2023, brooklynrail. org/2023/04/art-technology/ Arts-Intelligence-AI-and-HumanSystems.

16. See Roman Frigg and Stephan Hartmann, “Models in Science,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020); and William Wimsatt, “False Models as Means to Truer Theories,” in Neutral Models in Biology, eds. Matthew Nitecki and Antoni Hoffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 23–55.

17. Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, ed. Diana Wright (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008).

18. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 20.

plate. 2 RENDITION,

2024, oil on canvas, 54 × 60 in. (137.2 × 152.4 cm)

plate. 3 TAKE FIVE, 2024, oil on canvas, 35 × 40 in. (88.9 × 101.6 cm)

plate.

4 LEGACY, 2024, oil on canvas, 40 × 38 in. (101.6 × 96.5 cm)

plate.

5 THE HANDLER, 2024, oil on canvas, 40 × 50 in. (101.6 × 127 cm)

plate. 6 ROSE ROOM, 2024, oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 121.9 cm)

plate. 7 VAULT, 2024, oil on canvas, 42 × 40 in. (106.7 × 101.6 cm)

plate. 8 VENICE, 2024, oil on canvas, 42 × 40 in. (106.7 × 101.6 cm)

plate. 9 DRAWING ROOM, 2024, oil on canvas, 42 × 40 in. (106.7 × 101.6 cm)

BIOGRAPHY

Tim Kent’s paintings often draw from his rich knowledge of and interest in art history—ranging from the vocabulary of Greek sculptures and Baroque interiors to the sensibility of French Rococo and Brutalist architecture—to depict psychologically charged spaces, revisit historical events, and unsettle familiar vistas. Gestural brush strokes and elements of abstraction fuse architecture and landscape, objects and figures, though the picture plane is never flattened. Rather, the viewer negotiates a deep space constructed by Kent’s hallmark use of perspectival techniques. Combining these assorted references with archival and personally amassed photographs of real architectural spaces, Kent employs architectural rendering software, virtual reality programs, photo processing applications, and, more recently, generative AI to sketch out models of the spaces he paints. Alex Estorick in Art Review remarked that “as a painter who seeks, in his own words, ‘to make sense of the things we can’t see,’ Tim Kent is well suited to a world in which many images are invisible to the unassisted human eye.”

Kent was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1975, and received a M.A. from the University of Sussex at West Dean College and B.F.A. from Hunter College. As a first generation American from Turkish and English parentage who emigrated to the United States, his work attempts to express a narrative based around the mechanisms of history and personal memory, as well as the visual structures of power that determine our experience. Trained in perspective painting at West Dean College,

University of Sussex, he started his career by rendering historical homes throughout England, which sparked his interest in the complex historical and psychological narratives held by architecture and design and art and culture. Kent lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024

Histories in Flux, JD Malat Gallery, London

2023

Chronos and Kairos, Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey

Possession Pt. I, Pilevneli Yalikavak, Yalikavak, Turkey

2022

Between the Lines, Hollis Taggart Gallery, New York

2021

Vagaries of Precision, Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montreal, Canada

2020

Enfilade, Slag Gallery, New York

2018

Dark Pools and Data Lakes, Slag Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2017

Tim Kent, Kunstverein Vierheim, Viernheim, Germany

2016

Terra Infirma, Brandt Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Tim Kent, VOLTA, New York

2015

A World After Its Own Image, Slag Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2014

Temporal Strata, VOLTA, Basel, Switzerland

2013

The Gambit, Slag Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2010

The Best of Times, Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, London

2009

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Factory Fresh, Brooklyn, NY

2007

Camera to Camera, Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, Petworth, UK

2006

Transience of Being, Queen Street Gallery, Chichester, UK

2003

Primer Drawings, Gallery 800, Brooklyn, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024

This We Believe, 21st Century Museum Hotels, Louisville, KY

2023

Artweeks Artekuler, Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey

Contemporary Istanbul, Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey

Of the Past and Present, Hollis Taggart Gallery, New York

Land of Honey, Leila Heller Gallery, New York

2022

Digital Combines, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

Artweeks@Arkaretler, Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey

2021

ABSTRAKSHN, Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montreal, Canada

Reunion, Hollis Taggart, Southport, CT

2020

Pilevnel@Contemporary, Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey

Art Miami, Hollis Taggart, New York, online

Figure as Form, Hollis Taggart, New York

Artweeks@Akaretler, Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey

This We Believe, 21st Century Hotels Gallery, Chicago

2019

Art Now 2019, Hearst Foundation, New York

Structures of Power, Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montreal, Canada

2017

Art Now 2017, Hearst Foundation, New York

Kunstverein Worms, Worms, Germany

ART@SAP Foundation, SAP Foundation, Walldorf, Germany

2016

Pulse, Miami, FL

Hieronymus Bosch: Contemporary Artists Celebrating the Master, The National Arts Club, New York

2015

Artmix, Boulder MoCA, CO

2014

Tim Kent and Tirtzah Bassel, VOLTA 10, Basel, Switzerland

2013

A Pile of Clowns, Centotto Galleria, Brooklyn, NY

2012

Whitney Museum GREY AREA

Instagram Project and Studio Party, New York

Theriomorphous Entourage, Centotto Galleria, Brooklyn, NY

Courtesy Roman Abramovich: The First Unveiling, Centotto Galleria, Brooklyn, NY

Nautical Notes: Mari, Navi e Naufragi, Centotto Galleria, Brooklyn, NY

2010

Good Vibrations, MK Gallerie, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Among Darkened Woods, Factory Fresh, Brooklyn, NY

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Pandemonium Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Hinterland and the Hegemon, Centotto Galleria, Brooklyn, NY

Terrae and the Ether, Centotto Galleria, Brooklyn, NY

2009 Gallery Benoit, Boston

Wild Garden Brooklyn, Brooklyn, NY

2007

Momento Mori, The Artists Network, New York

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK

Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, Petworth, UK

2005

(T)Here Galleria Na Solyanke, Moscow, Russia

Flux Project, Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, Petworth, UK

Reclamation, West Dean College, West Dean, UK

2004

Death to The Fascist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People, TAG Projects, Brooklyn, NY

Small Works Show, Washington Square Galleries, New York University, New York

What the Whitney Don’t Know, TAG Projects, Brooklyn, NY

2003

D.U.M.B.O. Works on Paper, TAG Projects, Brooklyn, NY

Five Degrees, Whitecouch Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY

PRESENTATIONS & TALKS

2023

“Gallery Talk: Chronos and Kairos,” Pilevneli, Istanbul

“Seminar with Tim Kent,” Yellow Chair Salon (online)

2022

“Tim Kent: Interview with Brainard Carey,” Museum of Non Visible Art, Yale University Radio

2021

“Artist Talk,” Instagram Live, Hollis Taggart Gallery

2019

“Schismatic Technics: Visualizing Systems from 1600 to Present” in Metaveillant Issues, College Art Association, New York

2018

“Artist Talk: Dark Pools and Data Lakes,” Slag Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2017

“Artist Talk,” Kunstverein Vierheim, Germany

2016

“Hieronymus Bosch: Contemporary Artists Discussing the Master,” The National Arts Club, New York

2014

“Painting Architecture,” The National Arts Club, New York

2013

“Artist Talk: The Gambit,” Slag Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2007

“Artist Talk: Camera to Camera,” Moncrieff-Bray, Petworth, UK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Roz Dineen, “Notes on Violence, Relationships and Art,” ArtReview, July 31, 2024, artreview.com/ hari-kunzru-blue-ruin-rachel-cuskparade-review-roz-dineen.

Alex Estorick, “Tim Kent’s Painterly Assault on History,” ArtReview, July 9, 2024, artreview.com/timkent-histories-in-flux-jd-malatgallery-london-review-alex-estorick.

Alex Estorick, “Tim Kent: Histories in Flux,” ArtReview, Summer Issue, June 2024.

Joanna Motodieva, “You Don’t Rebuild History, You Modify it: Tim Kent ‘Histories in Flux’ at JD Malat Gallery,” FETCH Magazine, May 23, 2024, fetch.london/post/ you-don-t-rebuild-history-youmodify-it-tim-kent-s-histories-influx-at-jd-malat-gallery.

Will Moffitt, “Abstract Ideas: Tim Kent’s ‘Histories in Flux’ on View at JD Malat Gallery,” Mayfair Times, May 8, 2024, edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/ html5/reader/production/default. aspx?pubname=&edid=cdbcb2bfcdd7-4338-8fb3-5c784115336b&pnum=23.

“Tim Kent Disrupts Traditional Depictions of the Interior Space in His Enchanting Exhibition at JD Malat Gallery,” ArtDaily, May 6, 2024, artdaily.com/news/168954/Tim-Kentdisrupts-traditional-depicions-of-theinterior-space-in-his-enchantingexhibition-at-JD-Malat-Gallery.

Emann Odufu, Land of Honey (Dubai and New York: Leila Heller Gallery, 2023).

Robert Zeller, New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2023).

Mary Ann Caws, Tim Kent: Between the Lines (New York: Hollis Taggart, 2022).

William Corwin, “Between the Lines: An interview with Tim Kent,” Brooklyn Rail, July 2022, vimeo. com/732559831.

Gary Ryan, “Tim Kent: Between the Line at Hollis Taggart,” White Hot Magazine, July 2022, whitehotmagazine. com/articles/lines-at-hollis-taggartgallery/5469.

Pierre Rimbert, “Quelle Coalition Face au Bloc Bourgeois?,” Le Mondediplomatique, February 2022, monde-diplomatique.fr/2022/02/ RIMBERT/64369.

Marc Endeweld, “Emmanuel Macron and the Deep State,” Le Mondediplomatique, September 1, 2020, monde-diplomatique.fr/2020/09/ ENDEWELD/62194.

William Corwin, “Tim Kent: Enfilade,” The Brooklyn Rail, August 1, 2020, brooklynrail.org/2020/07/artseen/ Tim-Kent-Enfilade.

“Memory.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2019.

Virginia Wagner, “The Matrix: Tim Kent at Slag Gallery,” Artcritical, October 4, 2019, artcritical.com/2018/10/04/ virginia-wagner-on-tim-kent.

William Corwin, “Tim Kent: Dark Pools and Data Lakes at Slag Gallery,” Delicious Line, September 29, 2018, deliciousline.org/review/331.

Kurt McVey, “Tim Kent Paints a New Perspective at Slag Gallery in Brooklyn.” QuietLunch, September 21, 2018, quietlunch.com/tim-kent-paintsa-new-perspective-at-slag-galleryin-brooklyn.

Shelby Welinder, “Tim Kent: A Man and His Madness,” Candid Magazine, April 12, 2017.

Andrew Katz, “Scenes from Pulse Miami,” New American Paintings, December 4, 2016, newamericanpaintings.com/blog/scenes-pulsemiami-2016.

Paul D’Agostino, “Armory Week 2016: A Pile of Great,” Brooklyn Magazine, March 11, 2016, bkmag.com/2016/ 03/11/armory-week-2016-pile-great.

Jocelyn Jeffery, “The Abstract Geometric World of Tim Kent,” Huffington Post, March 8, 2016, huffpost.com/entry/the-abstractgeometric-wo_b_9405486?ec_ carp=651363550768590316.

Brian P. Kelly, “Armory Week Round-Up,” New Criterion, March 4, 2016, newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/ armory-week-roundup.

Daniel Larkin, “Dreamscapes for the 21st Century,” Hyperallergic, March 4, 2016, hyperallergic.com/280703/ dreamscapes-for-the-21st-centuryat-the-volta-art-fair/.

Kurt McVey, “Tim Kent: A World After Its Own Image,” Creem Magazine, February 2015.

James Panero, “Gallery Chronicles,” New Criterion, April 14, 2014, newcriterion.com/issues/2014/4/ gallery-chronicle-7877.

Louise Nicholson, “Tim Kent: A Room of His Own,” Fine Art Connoisseur, March 15, 2014.

Brian P. Kelly, “The Other Fairs,” New Criterion, March 13, 2014, newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/ the-other-fairs.

Stefan Kobe, “Knappe Kunst bei Freunden,” Art Magazine Online, March 7, 2014, artmagazine.at/ content76951.html.

Ben La Rocco, “Paintings at 56 Bogart,” Brooklyn Rail, November 5, 2013, brooklynrail.org/2013/11/ artseen/painting-at-56-bogart.

Paul D’Agostino, “The Measure: 4 Art Exhibits You Need to See,” L Magazine, October 2013.

Miles Redd, Miles Redd’s Big Book of Chic (New York: Assouline, 2012).

Gil Schafer III, The Great American House (New York: Rizzoli, 2012).

R. J. Maitland, “Tim Kent: Painter Explores Rich Terrain of Interior Façade,” Flaunt Magazine, December 2010.

Cynthia King, “The Best of Tradition: Miles Redd Interiors & Gil Shafer Architect, A Classic Country House with a Colorful Twist,” Elle Décor, November 2010, elledecor.com/ design-decorate/a4024/the-best-oftradition-a-67017.

Chris Rywalt, “All That Is Solid,” Crywalt Review, September 26, 2009, crywalt.com/blog/2009/09.

Aaron Short, “Artist Tim Kent Freshens Up,” New York Post, September 22, 2009, nypost.com/2009/ 09/22/artist-tim-kent-freshens-up.

Benjamin Sutton, “Against Chelsea: A DIY Art Scene Grows in Brooklyn,” L Magazine, May 12, 2009.

Edward Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture (London: Continuum Press, 2007).

Holland Cotter, “Art in Review: Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People,” New York Times, June 25, 2003, nytimes.com/2004/ 06/25/arts/art-in-review-death-tothe-fascist-insect-that-preys-on-thelife-of-the-people.html.

This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition “Tim Kent: Edges Off a Model” organized by Hollis Taggart, New York, and presented from September 12–October 12, 2024.

ISBN: 979-8-9902841-1-1

Reproduction of contents prohibited.

Hollis Taggart

521 West 26th Street 1st & 2nd Floors

New York, NY 10001

Tel 212 628 4000

www.hollistaggart.com

Catalogue production: Kara Spellman

Copyediting: Jessie Sentivan

Design: McCall Associates, New York

Printing: Point B Solutions, Minneapolis

Photography: Dan Bradica Studio, New York

Front cover: Venice (detail), 2024, pl. 8

Frontispiece and back cover: Tim Kent in his Brooklyn studio, 2024, photographed by Jon C. Demske, New York

Tim Kent: Edges Off a Model