Opening Reception: January 18, 3 – 5 PM
January 18 – March 8, 2025
Tim Braden: The Colouring Garden
January 18 – March 8, 2025
Tim Braden: The Colouring Garden
McClain Gallery is pleased to present Tim Braden: The Colouring Garden, our first exhibition of the British artist’s work. The exhibition will feature works from a new series that gathers both interior scenes and abstracted landscapes. A carefully orchestrated riot of colors pours from the paintings, and Braden’s attention to art history and the methods that make artists artisans is on display in this enchanting group of works. Wielding a delicate brush on his spare surfaces, Braden’s impeccable understanding of color, light, and places shines through. Braden will join us for the opening on Saturday, January 18.
Often utilizing doubling and repetition as a method and a theme, Braden made the paintings in our show after meeting friend and fellow artist Yto Barrada and her garden. Located in Tangier, Morocco, The Mothership is a wild yet calculated place that Barrada cultivates with plants used for natural dyeing. Braden’s landscape paintings repeat multiple views of the same garden scene, which almost becomes archetypal through picturing and repicturing. The tale of Braden’s arrival at this wonder-filled landscape is one of coincidence, chance encounters, and inescapable connections. Braden explains the twists and turns that led him to making these works in a straightforward series of serendipities.
The interiors are from various found sources. Braden’s interior views, usually made quite quickly, are frequent motifs that he thinks of as source material. By cropping and zooming into areas of interest in certain paintings, the artist then borrows incidental marks and generates areas of color harmony for larger, more abstracted paintings. Braden isolates particularly compelling instances of marks and brush strokes in these abstract compositions. Braden’s oeuvre is a testament to painterly observation, translating a saturated color palette into a light-filled vision that sometimes calls forth a narrative but can just as well remain mysteriously visual.
McClain Gallery is grateful to Ryan Lee Gallery for their collaboration.
Tim Braden on The Colouring Garden:
“I came across an image of a woman in a garden and made a little watercolour on canvas painting of her in 2018. I didn’t know anything about her. In 2022, I was looking at the painting again and decided to investigate her and the garden.
I discovered that the woman in the garden was called Marguerite McBey, a painter and gardener who lived in Tangier with her Scottish Painter husband James McBey. I know of James McBey because I often drive past his incredible studio/house at no.1 Holland Park in London.
In 2022, I did some research and discovered that the McBeys had two houses in Tangier, so I decided to go to try to find the garden. On my first flight out there, I bumped into a woman I’d met once before briefly, Sarah Rose Wheeler, but didn’t know well. We sat chatting on the plane and I told why I was going to Tangier.
Her mother had taken that photo of Marguerite, and knew her well. She is featured in Interior with Marguerite Twice.
On my very first evening in Tangier, I was invited to dinner by my friend Jasper Conran, who was staying, by chance, at the first McBey house (El Foulk) that I had gone to Tangier hoping to find.
The other McBey house, called Jalobey (a portmanteau of their names James McBey and marguerite Loeb), is owned by the family of the French/Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. On my next visit to Tangier, a year later, I met up with Yto and we walked around her garden which is overgrown with plants chosen for their dye making qualities.
It turns out Yto and I are big fans of each others’ work, and she has a painting of mine (of the Jardin D’Essai in Algiers) on her studio wall. I decided, with her blessing, to make a show about her garden, ‘La Coloriste’ in 2023.
I will be going back to Yto’s house and garden in 2025 to run some painting workshops at her residency program, ‘the Mothership’."
WORKS IN EXHIBITION
Tim Braden
Colouring Garden (blues on green), 2024
oil on canvas
59 5/8 x 74 7/8 inches
SOLD
Tim Braden
Interior with Ultramarine and Lemon Yellow, 2024
oil on canvas
20 1/8 x 15 7/8 inches
Tim Braden
Yellow Room (canvas), 2024
oil on canvas
20 1/8 x 15 7/8 inches
SOLD
Tim Braden
Le Jardin Colorant (violet and magenta), 2023
oil on canvas
66 7/8 x 82 5/8 inches
RESERVED
BIOGRAPHY
Tim Braden (b. 1975 Perth, Scotland) is a London-based artist who works primarily in painting, incorporating a myriad of techniques and approaches. Using different types of paint, supports, 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. 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. 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.
Braden received his MA from Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and attended Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His work has 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, Norway, among others. It 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.