Tim Gardner

Canadian artist Tim Gardner is well-known internationally for his figurative works based on personal snapshots of family events, vacations with friends and day to day activities. Mostly realized as intimate and precise watercolour paintings and oil pastel drawings, his early work used photographs of his older brother and friends as source material, capturing the sometimes excessive leisure activities of these post adolescent men engaged in sporting activities or partying.

For his solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, his first in Canada, Gardner places new emphasis on landscape and watercolour. In this new work, the landscape becomes a subject matter to formally engage with the properties of watercolour as a medium that offers a unique immediacy. This temporality is also implicit in the nature of the snapshot which is more about capturing a moment than formal precision. Yet, Gardner’s watercolours are precise and the snapshots he chooses considered over time. There is a gestation period, where the snapshot has to develop the patina of time, before Gardner will even consider it as a source.

The figure still plays an important role in these new works. Gardner often incorporates a muted or isolated figure within an otherwise prominent Canadian landscape. A literal relation between figure and ground becomes an important method to draw parallels between the manner in which nature is represented and how it is encountered on a day to day basis.

Biography

Tim Gardner will have his first solo show in Canada at the Contemporary Art Gallery in April 2009. He has had solo exhibitions at The National Gallery, London; Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London; 303 Gallery, New York; and Galleria Il Capricorno, Venice. Gardner has been in several group exhibitions at galleries such as SFMoMA, San Fransisco; The Parrish Art Sueum, Southhampton and the Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv. Tim Gardner has been written about by Jennifer Higgie for Frieze, and Christopher Riopelle, curator of post-1800s painting at the National Gallery, London. He has also been featured in periodicals such as Art Forum, Art in America, Flash Art and Border Crossings.