“A woman in her late 60’s, with beautiful white hair, sat next to me in a café, and, after ordering a small cup of coffee, took out a sheet of letter writing paper and in an elegant hand began; Chère Tante Hanneke, …”
Tim Braden
Like all of Braden’s work the title opens up tangential hints of other people, places and times, and presents the artist as storyteller. Who could this be, where is she from? Language is used not as a tool for communication, but for the pleasure of mis-understanding and to suggest somewhere else.
In the first room are two large free-standing sculptures made from painted steel of two outsize playground toys. Objects Braden describes as simultaneously evocative and ignorable – their bright colours, faded and steel, rusted. Versions of the kind of shapes that you see everyday, but are very hard to recall accurately. These sculptures don’t refer to real animals or airplanes, but to other toy versions, their scale is ‘wrong’, but only because no child could sit on them comfortably, not because airplanes are much bigger in real life.
A painting based on a plan of a former holiday camp for navel cadets is propped up against the wall on two rusty metal legs, while a video monitor placed against a backdrop of a painting of clouds, shows films captured on super-8 of a girl running through a forest.
In the second room, a large handmade wooden school blackboard is painted with the name ‘Marie’ and a suggestion of a colour theory chart. In another painting we are onlookers on a film-set in which cameras are trained on a man climbing a kind of model alpine mountain.
Finally, in the third room the installation ‘Looking at ballet’ incorporates a large painting on canvas of ballerinas, a small watercolour taken from a sentimental book cover of a family group watching from a theatre box, and a series of drawings on paper, ‘Attempts to draw a ballerina’s hand in the dark with a carpenter’s pencil’. These were made during a performance by the Mariinsky Ballet, from the very back of a theatre where it was impossible to actually observe any of the detail of the performance. The drawings reveal the nature of the ballet performance as a spectacle, and it’s reliance on the audience’s memory.
Braden’s subject is the pleasure of looking, those small epiphanies when you really see something for the first time; all his work is unified by a desire to avoid constraints of correct scale or colour, to return to a more formative approach to his visual memory.
This translates into works, and an entire exhibition, that aims to encourage the viewer to return to a more simple, associative response to the world and the things in it. Beyond the underlying criticism of the training and rigours of formal education is a reminder of the importance of our imagination.
This is Tim Braden’s first major solo exhibition. Born in the UK in 1975, he is currently based in Amsterdam completing a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tim studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art in Oxford (1996-99), and the St. Petersburg Academy of Art in Russia (1994-95). Later this year Tim will be included in upcoming exhibitions at the Museum Van Loon and Van Gogh Museum, both in Amsterdam.
A book will be published to accompany this exhibition, with essays by Dan Fox, Michael Ignatieff and Will Holder.
Timothy Taylor Gallery is at 21 and 24 Dering Street, London, W1S 1TT. Open 10-6pm Mon-Fri; 10-1pm Sat. For further information please contact Lee Johnson. Tel: 020 7409 3344 or email: [email protected]
