RYAN LEE is pleased to present Tim Braden: Porthmeor, the artist’s first solo show in New York. The exhibition will feature Braden’s latest body of work in which he explores a new methodology of making abstract paintings alongside figurative work as well as investigating the role of the artist studio in history and its relation to his own practice.

Braden’s studio-based practice is centered around painting and various techniques of application. Paintings of paintings and of artist studios reoccur in his work. Employing abstract and figurative qualities, the Porthmeor series is based on images of Patrick Heron’s studio in the small fishing village of St. Ives located in Cornwall, UK, a center of artistic production in the 1920s and again in the 1950s-60s that hosted the most important British avant-garde artists working at the time, including William Scott, Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, and Sandra Blow. Braden recently encountered a photograph of Heron’s studio at Zennor, conjuring up Heron’s influence on his practice and his decision to attend art school. Using the photograph as a reference point, Braden considers the artist’s experience of painting and what it means to access this experience by recreating these works. “By painting the studio and the works in it I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to make that work and what it might mean now to make echoes of them,” Braden says. It is an intellectual extraction of moments past and an investigation into the act of painting.

Braden’s spirited abstractions are made methodically alongside his figurative work as a way to explore how these two realms can oscillate among a body of work and how interconnected they are. This body of work evokes Heron’s similar attention to abstraction and figuration defined in his practice by a vocabulary of connected forms and the balance of color and space. Recently moving away from photographic inspiration, Braden focuses on the immediate experience of painting. He embraces color and pattern directly, while reflecting on the function and history of abstraction in its varied contexts, from the museum to the studio to the home. Using disparate materials from discarded cardboard to high-quality fabrics, Braden forges arbitrary compositions within a premeditated category or theme, reserving the authority as artist to keep its status in flux.

Tim Braden (b. 1975, Perth, UK) received his MA from Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and attended Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He has exhibited widely, including at Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow; Gemeente Museum, The Hague; Hamburger Bahnhof at Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam; and Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. He completed site-specific projects in Iceland in 2006 and for the Goethe Institute in New York in 2009. His work is included in several public collections, among them the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Nederlandse Bank, Amsterdam; Pembroke College, Oxford; Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, UK; and Zabludowicz Collection, London.