Tim Braden

Looking and Painting

Texts by Christopher Bedford, Jennifer Higgie and Dominic Molon

Constantly shifting between representation and abstraction, while referencing art, architecture and design and embracing the decorative, 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 frequently 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 Roberto Burle Marx. Braden also plays with scale and expectation, creating ‘found’ abstract compositions from cropped fragments of his own figurative works that he then realizes as oversized paintings on canvas or small oil sketches on card.

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 various themes and styles of his work, and includes many paintings that have never been shown in public before. The book includes responses to Braden’s work by Jennifer Higgie, Christopher Bedford, and Dominic Molon.

Tim Braden studied at the Ruskin Oxford; St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He has exhibited widely, including at Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow; Gemeente Museum, The Hague; Hamburger Bahnhof at Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam; the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; and the Goethe Institute in New York. His work is in many private and public collections internationally including New Art Gallery, Walsall, and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. He lives and works in London.

Christopher Bedford is the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Jennifer Higgie is a writer and editorial director of frieze. She is the editor of The Artist’s Joke, author of the novel Bedlam and the children’s book There’s Not One.

Dominic Molon is the Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum, Rhode Island.