Tim Braden (b. 1975 Perth, Scotland) is an artist who works in both painting and sculpture, incorporating various techniques and materials across media. Using different types of paint, support, and application to explore subtle shifts in space, mood and tone, Braden’s work is ultimately drawn from a close reading of his environment and an attempt to depict the act of looking at things. He is continuously looking at and re-evaluating his own work in progress to align these observations, and he often combines patches of color and light to produce scenes that recall both the specificity of personal experience and nostalgia for another time and place.
Braden’s oeuvre reflects a comprehensive reflection on the schism between abstraction and figuration. The work he produces ranges from tight figuration to total abstractions, in which he dissolves recognizable images and reconstructs them within his simultaneously precise and aerial style. Braden’s fluid and inventive treatment of the abstract and figurative within his compositions reflect his distinctive eye on the world. “For me,” Braden explains, “it is often only by making something in three dimensions that I come to understand it." His vivid and colorful works derive from a wide range of stylistic influences, including French Impressionism, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Sonia Delaunay and Roberto Burle Marx. He further looks to Maghrebian textile, furniture, architecture, gardening and applied arts to inspire and inform his practice, thus contributing to a modernist effort to blur the once strictly-imposed boundaries between the so-called “fine arts” and craft traditions.
With an exceptional eye for the Mediterranean light that has inspired generations of artists before him, Braden suffuses his works with a masterful sense of brightness. Each of Braden’s compositions concentrates and reflects upon a wealth of important art historical traditions—as an artist, he does not seek new subjects, but new ways of imagining.
In 2018, Art/Books published Looking and Painting, a fully illustrated monograph on the artist. The book features work created over the past decade, including many never-before-seen paintings and new texts by Jennifer Higgie (editor of Frieze magazine), Christopher Bedford (director of the Baltimore Museum of Art) and Dominic Molon (contemporary curator at RISD).
Braden received his MA from Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and attended Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He lives and works in London, England.
His work has been exhibited at a solo booth at the Armory Show, in 2020. He has further been exhibited at The Corn Hall, England; Frac, France; Henry Moore Institute, England; Baibakov Art Projects, Russia; Gemeentemuseum, The Netherlands; Goethe Institute, New York, NY; Schloss Ringenberg, Germany; Van Gogh Museum, The Netherlands; Museum Van Loon, The Netherlands; Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany; and Kunstnernes Hus, Norwary, among others.
His work is held in the collections of Ashmolean Museum, UK; Cazenove Collection, UK; Lazards Collection, UK; Nederlandse Bank (Dutch National Bank), Amsterdam; Pembroke College, UK; Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, UK and the Zabludowicz Collection, UK.