DENK gallery is pleased to present new and recent works by Los Angeles-based artist Tim Ebner in Metal Paintings. The geometric Finish-Fetish inspired pieces of the late 80s for which Ebner received international attention, gave way to subsequent bodies of representational painting and sculpture and later forays into painterly abstraction. The artist's newest work combines the formal concision of his earlier interest in Minimalism with the material-rigor of craft to produce sculptural paintings in an expanded field.

Technically informed by his experience working with Blacksmiths at a forge, Ebner's recent pieces are physical exertions, bent, hammered and shaped from 26 gauge cold roll steel, an industrial sheet metal the artist later finishes in glassy urethane. These works, produced through a physically demanding and substantially resistant process, function both pictorially as two-dimensional surfaces contained by the proposition of an implied frame, and plastically as three-dimensional objects in space. Ebner views the mutability of abstraction as a freeing alternative to the constraints of representation and narrative, focusing on the continued refinement of his process and technique to produce increasingly nuanced material results.

In Metal Paintings, Ebner will be presenting a new suite of 'hammered' textile works alongside those in steel. Similarly executed but in materials that yield differently, these fabric surfaces in velvet and canvas capture the ephemerality of impact as a trace rather than a dimension and produce a different spatial experience of the object altogether.