Omaha-born, New York-based artist Tim Brawner produces a practice of painting that mines the space between the uncanny and the grotesque. Seeking to produce in the viewer a compelling affect of unease, Brawner utilizes the idiom of illustration to render images of alienation, through the purposeful bricolage of disparate representational elements. In each work, a persistently fine, painterly execution meets the artist’s formal drafting process of drawing and montage to achieve what Brawner terms a pathos of ‘weirdness’: a form of defamiliarization which is also a seduction, an entreat, into a strange representational space nonetheless evoking trepidation and dread. These visual chimeras undermine the spectators’ traditional binary frames of reference, eliding at once those of conservative Western Christian morality and those of liberal secular paradigms of Enlightened empathy. As the artist intones, this ‘weirding’ is “part of the drama of the work; it is an ontological struggle [of an alternative world beyond our given dichotomies] to be represented… to come into being.”

Tim Brawner received an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2020. Solo exhibitions include Feels Like Heaven at von ammon co., Washington D.C.; Glad Tidings at Management, New York; Sometime Come the Mother, Sometime the Wolf at Union Pacific, London. Group exhibitions include Maskenfreiheit, Margot Samel, New York, NY; Focus Group 4, von ammon co, Washington, DC; OMGWTF, Primary Projects, Miami, FL; Companions, Union Pacific, London; Yale Painting & Printmaking MFA, Galerie Perrotin, New York, NY. Brawner’s exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail.