Four large oil paintings on canvas and a suite of smaller drawings and paintings feature repeated geometric elements worked into an all-over abstraction. Inspired by ancient glyphs, graffiti, and epigraphs culled from studies of Ancient Greece, zigzags, triangles, and waves repeat within irregular and interlocking planes. They formulate dynamic patterns that allude to the historical space of an ancient wall, perhaps transmitting the memory of past events and places.
Within the artist's drawings, portions of palm trees and ancient columns join decorative meanders commonly found on the surfaces of ancient architectural friezes and amphorae. Dense views of a Mediterranean cosmopolis formulate a jigsaw-like grid. As the artist writes,
"More recently, I have been employing the linguistic tense the imperfect as a theoretical rubric to understand my work, seeking to clue the paintings into a space of repetition, continuity, and a description of people, things, and conditions of the past. Having taken the past as a malleable concept that can be stretched, layered, and reimagined, the paintings offer a tableau of history as a continuous or progressive act. Through explorations of impasto, surface considerations, shifts of space within the picture plane and texture and color relationships, my work also concerns itself with the contemporary dialogue surrounding painting as a medium - its limitations, exceptions and role in 21st century art making practices."
Timothy Hull was born in New York, New York in 1979 and lives and works in Warwick, New York. He received an MFA from Parsons School of Design in 2006 and a BA from New York University in 2002. His works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Ashes/Ashes, Los Angeles, CA, Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY, and Fitzroy Gallery, New York, NY, among others. Group exhibitions include Invisible Exports, New York, NY, Bureau, New York, NY, Andrew Edlin, New York, NY, and FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France. His work has been discussed in ArtNews, Artforum, New American Paintings, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Brooklyn Rail, and the New York Times, among other publications.
