Stuart Shave/Modern Art is pleased to present Canadian artist Tim Gardner in his second solo show with the gallery.

Gardner is widely known for his small-scale watercolours, often based on snapshot photographs taken by his friends and family; depicting scenes of everyday life in photo realist accuracy. These images often describe hedonistic nights out with his brothers and college fraternity or images of lone figures walking in vast terrains. Other watercolours have been based on Gardner’s own photographs taken again of landscapes, at gatherings or in his family home.

Last year Gardner expanded his vocabulary with a large-scale series of pastels that were inspired by the epic landscapes in the paintings of Turner, Constable and Monet. Within these new works shown at Modern Art, Gardner has moved away from the suggestions of narrative depicted in his earlier watercolours, removing the figure entirely from his new series of urban landscapes. In these works Gardner has begun to explore the breach between the aspirations of urban culture and a historical search for the sublime. Gardner’s latest works have moved away from a direct questioning of the self to a larger examination of the world and the tense relationship we have with it.

The movement and immediacy inherent within watercolour as a medium allows Gardner to make his work with an enjoyed feeling of risk, selecting and editing happenings on the paper’s surface. Gardner works through his own relationship with the physical world, choosing to work intuitively and with observation as his template. Gardner’s dramatic skylines of intense, saturated colours are intentionally scarred by the precisely drawn incisions of the power lines and streetlamps that inescapably impinge upon our views of the dawn sky. Choosing not to remove these creeping and unwelcome additions to our picturesque skylines, Gardner underlines the pervasive human encroachment into the natural world evident in our everyday experiences and it is with a wry sense of irony that Gardner dilutes his watercolours with rainwater collected in a barrel from the top of his home on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Tim Gardner (b. 1973) lives and works Canada and will show in a solo exhibition at the National Gallery in January 2007. Gardner opened a one person exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, IN, in September 2005 and a one person show at the National Gallery, London, UK in 2007. In 2002 Tim Gardner’s work was included in “Painting On The Move”, curated by Peter Pakesch, at the Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, “Here is There 2”, Secession, Vienna, Austria” and “Some Options in Realism”, curated by Klaus Kurtess at the Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachussetts. Gardner’s work was seen in “Best of the Season” at The

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield,CT, in 2001 and in 2000 in “Greater New York”, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY