Tim Kent

Tim Kent, born in 1975, is a Canadian-American contemporary artist currently working in Brooklyn, New York whose work engages with issues related to power in art and history, global infrastructures and social relations. Kent was born to a British mother and a Turkish father on July 24, 1975, in Vancouver. After graduating from City University of New York (CUNY) with an Art History degree, the artist continued his academic life in the UK, receiving an MA degree in Sussex University in Painting. During his time at university he was hired to create renderings of historic homes in England, this venture sparked his fascination with architectural space. Kent's body of work consists of painted interiors and vistas, coalescing the art historical genres of architecture and landscape with fragmentation and abstraction creating ethereal compositions that harbour an phantasmic psychological atmosphere.

Kent transports the viewer into socio-psychological planes filled with gestural brush strokes and grid-like lines. This artistic method encompasses the mathematical teachings of visual perspective employed during the Renaissance. The formulaic detailing in Kent's work infers engineered plans of electrical grids, technological networks and other mechanical structures of the modern age. By harnessing old art historical systems with his own contemporary twist, Kent paints artificial landscapes that exist in a state of continuity, with new spaces unfolding and emerging the more you look. His work seeks to counteract the fixed nature and empirical portrayal of space in chamber art, transforming the genre from face-value depictions of truth to portrayals of mystery and peculiarity, asking viewers to question the sociological nature of architecture and interior space in relation to the human mind and body.

Kent received his MA post-graduate degree in painting at the University of Sussex at West Dean in 2004 and then pursued an MA in Visual art at the University of Sussex, in 2005. He has exhibited his works extensively both in the UK and overseas, including London, New York, Turkey, Germany and Switzerland.