Tim Gardner: The Full Story, a show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) that highlights the artist's technical skill, accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue of reviews and commentary framing the artist's context and background.
Tim Gardner's mastery at capturing the life-like details of a random mundane moment from daily life is striking. It's the first thing that truly strikes you as you move through the exhibition. You almost want to lean in, and often times I did and so did others around me, to confirm that it's indeed a painting and not a photograph. The spacious room on the third level of the gallery was separated into smaller sections painted in contrasting bright colors, blue, red, yellow, orange, purple,... giving visitors a visually dynamic experience throughout the show. This is an extensive and comprehensive exhibition.
The selection, which ranges from around 1993 to 2023, and comprises of 125 paintings showcases the artist's technical mastery of pastel, oil painting, watercolor and drawing. For example, Family Portrait 2 (2004-05) is perfectly rendered with pastel on paper mounted on canvas capturing what is clearly a family photograph from an old album that Tim Gardner found while vising his family in 2004. In later works, you find urban scenes like in Manhattan Avenue (2018), captured simply with watercolor on paper from photographs of when the artist was probably attending Graduate School at Columbia University.
Once you see the full exhibition, you get a sense of the geographical, situational and socio-economic backdrop of Tim Gardner's life. It's a documentation of moments, sometimes significant sometimes not, people that he knows intimately, and places he's been and things he has seen. It's like a sort of "photo-biography".
For Tim Gardner, it's all about capturing the moment with a photograph as you go about your day, whether you're grocery shopping or on vacation. With pieces like Surfer with Rocky Shore (2019) and Self Portrait with Old Piano (2020) the artist, through old photographs, travels back to a specific moment in time as he paints. Yet, the photographs also serve as a source of contemporary subjects for when he is composing composite images, for example, he uses the snapshot from Niagara Falls (2015), which he edits and transforms into Niagara Falls, Falling Star (2016). When you walk though the exhibition, you'll notice some pieces that are presented in doubles, re-produced in both daytime and night time.
Tim Gardner, "Niagara Falls", 2015, watercolour on paper
Tim Gardner, "Niagara Falls, Falling Star", 2016, oil on canvas
The narratives around Tim Gardner's body of work tend to highlight unfiltered reality, banal existence, the mundane, and everyday life moments. Throughout his career, you can see that he is a detached observer, objective, and separated from his subjects, something that is also apparent in his own self-portraits.
Extracts from the exhibition:
"There is in Gardner's paintings, a general resistance to, even defiance of, the art world's obsession with spectacle, with museum-scale forms and materials that physically dominate the viewer" Robin Laurence, Vancouver, 2014.
"Gardner evinces not a whiff of satire, let alone absurdity. He does not mock his subjects, let alone comment directly on their banality. He plays it dead straight, if he plays it all." Marc Mayer, New York, 2023.
" Subtly psychological, his art is exacting in technique, detached in scrutiny, yet majestic in its intimacy. Like a visual Haiku, It says all it needs to say, in a poetically engaging way." Paul Laster, New York, 2020.
In the same catalogue, curator Michael Nesbitt was able to dive deeper into the artist's story and creative process. This really is something you must go see for yourself at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Throughout the exhibition, there are extracts of analysis and commentary collected from essays about the artist and from interviews with the artist providing insights into these topics:
Personal snapshots
The banal and the sublime
Photo composition
Color and light
Night works
303 gallery, New York City
Grad School at Columbia university
Art School at the University of Manitoba
Pastel for portraits
Paint on the palette
Watercolour
The water in watercolour
The paper
I feel this body of work stunningly portrays Tim Gardner's external life story as is. The pieces capture the essence of a certain way of modern living, plain and simple, without adding to it or distorting it. Looking through this exhibition feels like looking through someone's camera roll - the content feels raw, random, unfiltered, sometimes self-conscious, and each image represents one majestic moment in time.
The modern lifestyle in question is a masculine, upper middle-class, and North American one, however, the work explores general life themes experienced globally including family moments, daily commute, life celebrations, friendship, camaraderie and adolescence, and it speaks to everyone regardless of background.
Tim Gardner: The full story is on view at the WAG, Winnipeg until April 2024.