Untitled Art

Hollis Taggart is pleased to announce its presentation of seven new oil paintings by Canadian-American artist, Tim Kent (b. 1975) at Untitled Art, Houston. The solo booth, titled Time Out of Time highlights Kent’s command of perspective, atmosphere, and narrative layering, as he explores psychological interiors, art historical references, and temporal collapse through richly composed architectural spaces. 

Known for his sophisticated fusion of classical composition and contemporary conceptualism, Kent’s newest paintings continue his steadfast interest in the psychological weight and historical residue embedded within architecture. For this presentation, he expands his focus to include interiors drawn from first-hand examinations of Houston’s historical sites, which are seamlessly integrated into his signature vocabulary. These environments while fictional evoke the textures of real history filtered through memory, imagination, and artifice. While firmly anchored in the history of European and Near Eastern art, Kent also plays with new technologies, merging and layering the referentiality of different visual codes, creating anachronisms that are simultaneously contemporary and classical. 

Trained as an architectural painter, Kent began his career rendering stately homes in the United Kingdom 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 two decades of travel and careful observation, Kent has amassed a large collection of personal and archival images about these architecturally significant spaces and historic environs across Europe and the United States, as well as the Middle East. He has studied artworks referencing these places, as well as how Generative AI softwares process such images. 

Time Out of Time signals a deepening of Kent’s exploration into temporal ambiguity. His paintings blur the past and the present while inquiring about our designs for the future. His landscapes recall historical events through deft gestures that evade nostalgia, by juxtaposing linear chronologies with the cycles of human experience. A domestic geometry provides the backdrop for his dramatic environments, while sharp lines of perspective recall the Renaissance formation that constructed pictorial space and time. These are combined with grid systems familiar to the contemporary world of technology and architecture. In contrast, figures and objets d’art remain enigmatic in abstract paint strokes that blur definite meaning. 

Kent’s interiors are filled with artworks – Persian carpets, marble sculptures, swagger portraits, and medieval tapestries, as well as compositional elements like partial windows and long hallways where effects of light shift the time of day. Motifs like painted folding screens obscure parts of the paintings’ subject to depict alternate imagery and insert simultaneous narratives. Drawing the viewer across the picture plane, playing with the visuality of representation, Kent challenges the viewer to become comfortable with the unknown. He reminds us that the interpretation of the layer beneath the surface is an ongoing process, shaped by each viewer’s knowledge, perception and imagination. 

While Kent has long explored the psychology of space and the tensions between the seen and the unseen, his new works in the booth disrupt efforts at autobiographical reading. In the foreground of many recent paintings, Kent has centered the figure of an artist, often in various stages of production, but has equally focused on those immersed in mundane domestic moments, like cleaning or dressing for an event merely alluded to. The figures suddenly become the viewer, who is likewise in the middle of a moment, here composing the narrative of the painting. As an artist who is well-versed in art history, yet plays with and subverts it, Kent’s subject matter suggests a depth to these canvases. The paintings exist in a sort of liminal space, caught between worlds, and attendees to the fast-paced action of today’s world are drawn into slow-viewing. 

Kent has exhibited widely across the United States and abroad, including solo shows at JD Malat Gallery in London; Pilevneli Gallery in Istanbul; Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York; Slag Gallery in New York; and Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Montreal. His work has been covered in many publications, including the book New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting by Monacelli Press, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, ArtReview, The Brooklyn Rail, New Criterion, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Fine Art Connoisseur, Lapham’s Quarterly, Le Monde diplomatique, White Hot Magazine, Architectural Digest, and Elle Décor. His work is held in various public and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Beijing; 21C Museum in Louisville, Kentucky; and the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York. Kent lives and works in Brooklyn. 

For more information on the gallery's booth presentation please contact us at +1 212.628.4000 or info@hollistaggart.com