Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present, “Wave to the Wind,” a focus on new works by UK- based artist Tim Garwood. Garwood’s work will be featured in an upcoming group exhibition on abstract painting, on view at Philip Martin Gallery from July 12 through September 20, 2025.
Tim Garwood’s pictures investigate landscape and picture-making, considering one against the other in order to better understand our experience of each. “These works feel like landscapes, or the feeling of a landscape at least,” Garwood comments. In his work, Garwood is getting at, not only what paintings of nature look like, but also how they make us feel. This is an important issue; looking and feeling, nature and non-nature, painting and subject are quintessentially modern problems. As critic Clement Greenberg notes in his 1961 essay, “On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting,” “The paradox of French painting from Courbet to Cézanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual experience with even greater fidelity.”
Tim Garwood’s fidelity to experience, visual and otherwise, adopts a kind of synesthetic sense that becomes only more abstract the more one looks. The terms with which one initially orients oneself - the edge of the picture and a sense of deep pictorial space supplemented by the occasional horizon line and figure/ground relations - make way for intense color interactions, a swirl of marks, and applied paint and mixed media. In his pictures, Garwood places the kind of French 19th-century pictorialism Greenberg describes into the context of what Leo Steinberg would later call in 1972, the “flatbed picture plane.” The flatbed is the thoroughly late 20th/early 21st-century experience of screens, phones, print media and, “any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed.”
Garwood’s paintings are figured in acrylic paint and mixed media. His color palette at times calls to mind that of Joan Mitchell or Claude Monet, with strong interactions between primary colors. Mixed media, including beads, rope, plastics, epoxies and a range of natural materials are organized across the picture plane. Again, the play between illusionistic color and material reality is one of the things that makes Tim Garwood’s work interesting. Are we looking through “painting as window” as it existed up until the French 19th-century? Are we looking at the 20th-century flatbed picture plane of Warhol, Rauschenberg and others? Or, given it is 2025, are we looking at some kind of amalgam that perfectly expresses the commonalities and conflicts of today’s mass-media and mass-consumerism in a powerful extension of the implications of how “information” is “received” today?
In the past few years, Garwood has transplanted himself from London to its environs. The Impressionists made their own journey from Haussmann’s rapidly changing urban Paris to the nature they found in the new suburbs of La Grande Jatte and Argenteuil. “As a result of my move to the countryside there is a definite shift in the materials that I am collaging into my work with a new leaning towards organic and natural materials, particularly plants. However,one man-made material that I am using increasingly is rope. It has an interesting push and pull between being man-made but also fluid and organic in its form. It is a material that really allows for ‘drawing’ a shape.” As Greenberg suggests, the pull between the vision of nature and its feeling pulls an artist in different directions; in particular towards abstraction. Yet as Steinberg suggests, the impressing of “information” has its own rhythm. Garwood goes on to comment, “I must harvest plants whilst they are available and then when they run out I have to wait for thenext season...The collaged elements are dried thoroughly and soaked in archival gel materials so that they are almost plasticised. This creates another man-made/natural conversation and how they interact together which I find interesting.”
The work of Tim Garwood (b. 1984, Epsom, UK) will be included in a group exhibition on abstract painting at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) this Summer. Garwood’s work is currently the subject of “Between Worlds” (Dover Street Arts Club, London, UK). His work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions at Sim Smith (London, UK); Lyndsey Ingram (London, UK); Denny Gallery (Hong Kong); Arario Gallery (Shanghai, China); Rich Mix (London, UK); Combustión Espontánea (Madrid, Spain); Unit 1 Gallery (London, UK). Tim Garwood’s work has recently been featured in the Art Newspaper and Then There Were Us. In 2020, a monograph of his work, “Abroad From Earth,” was published in the UK. Tim Garwood lives and works in London and Somerset.
The works in Tim Garwood’s focus, “Wave to the Wind,” are on view in an upcoming abstraction on abstract painting July 12 - September 20 2025. All works may be viewed at the gallery.
Philip Martin Gallery is open Wednesday-Saturday 11-5 and Tuesdays by appointment. The gallery is located at 3342 Verdugo Road, Los Angeles, CA 90065. For additional images and information, please call 323-507-2037 or email info@philipmartingallery.com.
Tim Garwood’s pictures investigate landscape and picture-making, considering one against the other in order to better understand our experience of each. “These works feel like landscapes, or the feeling of a landscape at least,” Garwood comments. In his work, Garwood is getting at, not only what paintings of nature look like, but also how they make us feel. This is an important issue; looking and feeling, nature and non-nature, painting and subject are quintessentially modern problems. As critic Clement Greenberg notes in his 1961 essay, “On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting,” “The paradox of French painting from Courbet to Cézanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual experience with even greater fidelity.”
Tim Garwood’s fidelity to experience, visual and otherwise, adopts a kind of synesthetic sense that becomes only more abstract the more one looks. The terms with which one initially orients oneself - the edge of the picture and a sense of deep pictorial space supplemented by the occasional horizon line and figure/ground relations - make way for intense color interactions, a swirl of marks, and applied paint and mixed media. In his pictures, Garwood places the kind of French 19th-century pictorialism Greenberg describes into the context of what Leo Steinberg would later call in 1972, the “flatbed picture plane.” The flatbed is the thoroughly late 20th/early 21st-century experience of screens, phones, print media and, “any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed.”
Garwood’s paintings are figured in acrylic paint and mixed media. His color palette at times calls to mind that of Joan Mitchell or Claude Monet, with strong interactions between primary colors. Mixed media, including beads, rope, plastics, epoxies and a range of natural materials are organized across the picture plane. Again, the play between illusionistic color and material reality is one of the things that makes Tim Garwood’s work interesting. Are we looking through “painting as window” as it existed up until the French 19th-century? Are we looking at the 20th-century flatbed picture plane of Warhol, Rauschenberg and others? Or, given it is 2025, are we looking at some kind of amalgam that perfectly expresses the commonalities and conflicts of today’s mass-media and mass-consumerism in a powerful extension of the implications of how “information” is “received” today?
In the past few years, Garwood has transplanted himself from London to its environs. The Impressionists made their own journey from Haussmann’s rapidly changing urban Paris to the nature they found in the new suburbs of La Grande Jatte and Argenteuil. “As a result of my move to the countryside there is a definite shift in the materials that I am collaging into my work with a new leaning towards organic and natural materials, particularly plants. However,one man-made material that I am using increasingly is rope. It has an interesting push and pull between being man-made but also fluid and organic in its form. It is a material that really allows for ‘drawing’ a shape.” As Greenberg suggests, the pull between the vision of nature and its feeling pulls an artist in different directions; in particular towards abstraction. Yet as Steinberg suggests, the impressing of “information” has its own rhythm. Garwood goes on to comment, “I must harvest plants whilst they are available and then when they run out I have to wait for thenext season...The collaged elements are dried thoroughly and soaked in archival gel materials so that they are almost plasticised. This creates another man-made/natural conversation and how they interact together which I find interesting.”
The work of Tim Garwood (b. 1984, Epsom, UK) will be included in a group exhibition on abstract painting at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) this Summer. Garwood’s work is currently the subject of “Between Worlds” (Dover Street Arts Club, London, UK). His work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions at Sim Smith (London, UK); Lyndsey Ingram (London, UK); Denny Gallery (Hong Kong); Arario Gallery (Shanghai, China); Rich Mix (London, UK); Combustión Espontánea (Madrid, Spain); Unit 1 Gallery (London, UK). Tim Garwood’s work has recently been featured in the Art Newspaper and Then There Were Us. In 2020, a monograph of his work, “Abroad From Earth,” was published in the UK. Tim Garwood lives and works in London and Somerset.
The works in Tim Garwood’s focus, “Wave to the Wind,” are on view in an upcoming abstraction on abstract painting July 12 - September 20 2025. All works may be viewed at the gallery.
Philip Martin Gallery is open Wednesday-Saturday 11-5 and Tuesdays by appointment. The gallery is located at 3342 Verdugo Road, Los Angeles, CA 90065. For additional images and information, please call 323-507-2037 or email info@philipmartingallery.com.
