Cris Worley Fine Arts is pleased to announce, Workings, a solo exhibition of new works by gallery artist Timothy Harding. This is Hardings’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.
Inspired by the midcentury art movements of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, and Minimalism, Harding creates sculptural paintings and installations that explore space, perception, and the relationship between the mechanical and the handmade.
Utilizing digital technology, Harding first draws his painting on a computer in order to create custom vinyl stencils of each shape, squiggle, and line. He then transfers his digitally-produced drawing to a canvas, painting layer upon layer until a fully articulated pattern emerges. Harding purposefully stretches his finished paintings across too-small supports, causing them to fold and buckle, essentially “sculpting” the canvases. Previous bodies of work featured wildly protruding and drooping canvases; others completely flat surfaces. The paintings in Workings fall somewhere in the middle, the canvases coaxed into subtle folds and ripples, an act Harding describes as the paintings “hugging” their supports.
Included in this exhibition is a site-specific installation comprised of multiple laser-cut wooden shapes derived from the same lines and scribbles that occupy the paintings. Interspersed in the installation are a number of grids – a shape that Harding often utilizes for its predetermined formality – created from a scan of one of his older paintings. Due to the painting’s undulating surface, the grids appear three dimensional, but are actually flat, toying with the perception of dimensionality.
“Workings is the culmination of Tim’s process at this point in time,” says Cris Worley. “He has hit on something really big: a refinement of the metadata of his practice. Tim has cultivated a powerful new relationship with line, color and form. It’s recorded energy; a diary of electrical impulse.”
Timothy Harding lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Tarleton State University. Harding received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Texas Christian University (2010), and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Texas Woman’s University (2008). In 2018 Harding was a visiting artist at the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2016 he received a Nasher Sculpture Center Artist Grant. Harding has exhibited nationally and held residencies at 77Art, the Wassaic Project, and the Vermont Studio Center.
