18 November – 18 December, 2010
This exhibition is Gardner’s third solo show with Modern Art, and will be his first exhibition in London for three years – since his solo show at the National Gallery in 2007.
Tim Gardner’s intimately scaled photo-realistic watercolours describe an intense air of naturalistic ease. His paintings unerringly and precisely communicate a deeply felt sense of distinctly ‘middle’ America. Gardner steadily maintains a careful and sincere approach to landscape and figuration. He has sensitivity for his chosen medium that betrays a personal and emotional connection to his subject matter – expressing an emotive condition from the perspective of one who belongs to the world recorded and communicated in his work.
The paintings in this show offer profoundly innocent vignettes, painted from photographs taken by the artist during years spent living in Los Angeles and on Vancouver Island. These paintings describe unremarkable lives seen within landscape, lives subconsciously resigned to the steadfast encroachment of their built environment upon hitherto natural wilderness. Gardner’s paintings focus on the middle-distance: a space where his subject becomes at-once a candid meditation on suburban lifestyle and a situational awareness of the effects of the ongoing inhabitation of landscape. The tensions in Gardner’s work are of the awareness of slight conditions: ease and unease, desperation and longing, complacency and discontent.
