Alumni News
New York-based artist and West Dean College alumni Tim Kent has an upcoming solo show entitled 'The Gambit' at Slag Gallery in Brooklyn, running between October 11th and November 8th 2013.
"The Gambit is a series of paintings that are sequences in a film-like narrative, where the main action is about to occur or has just happened. The concept of The Gambit originated from Kent's stay at the strange Wentworth Woodhouse in England, where in the 18th century the painter George Stubbs was commissioned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham to paint portraits of the Earl's winning race horses. Stubbs' studio work included performing several dissections of the animals, which led to one of the finest equestrian portraits "WhistleJacket," as well as the most accurate book on the anatomy of the horse. Elements of this uncanny tale are filtered through the resonant personality of Kubrick's panoramic interiors, combined with the strident colors of Bushwick's street aesthetic, where a street corner conversation twists with a bit of good oldfashioned two-point perspective, to construct the aesthetic considerations layering Kent's latest work.
Tim Kent established his reputation as a painter of architectural interiors on both sides of the Atlantic, due to his thorough knowledge of perspective, working with major designers and estate families to depict the art of a single room. Since 2009, Kent has worked deeper into abstraction, while highlighting individual figures and objects within the spaces. With this show, Kent brings forward the perspective lines as a key visual element to reinforce the structure of the paintings while also deconstructing their stability.
The images are made through a combination of photographs collected over the years visiting and painting stately homes, elaborate architectural renderings of rooms, complex perspective drawings, and notebooks of memory and imagination. The banality of life, even within a resplendent lifestyle, is warped into Kent's own musings on the extraordinary circumstances in which a flat surface becomes a space containing our cultural yearnings. These elements are pushed into abstraction in Kent's latest work, as the structural elements interrupt narrative flow, opening up spaces between the walls."
Slag Gallery
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn NY 11206
